I was at a session yesterday at Sea Lice 2010, called “Resistance”. It had titles such as “Reduced sensitivity to emamectin benzoate in a farm population of sea lice”, “Increased tolerance towards emamectin benzoate versus fitness in lab-reared sea louse”, etc.
The plenary talk was given by Professor Tor Horsberg, from the Norwegian School of Veterinary Science in Norway. He's a pharmacologist who has studied this for a number of years. He's a world authority. He showed us the problems that were happening in Norway. One of the things he said was that SLICE wasn't working in this last year. It's the last chemical that has been developed, and it was developed in 1999. So we're talking about something that's 11 years out of date now in terms of recent developments. He did say that they were working on vaccines for fish to deal with sea lice, but as far as he knew—and he should know—there was nothing in the pipeline for vaccines right now.
He was quite worried about the efficacy of SLICE, obviously, as were many of the other people. He talked about how they had to resort to other ways that were used in the past to deal with lice, including organophosphates like DDT and those kinds of things, and chitin disruptors.
One of the things that Norway does, too, is take boats around to these farms, closed boats, and they have a hydrogen peroxide bath that they put these fish in to kill the lice. But all these things have limitations on what they do in terms of killing lice, and Norway has a problem.
I also sat down to lunch yesterday with Dr. Karin Boxaspen, who's a major sea louse researcher in Norway. She said the only reason they actually saved some fish last year, in terms of the wild fish, is because they had an exceptional cold snap that killed off some of the lice. She said it would have been far worse without the weather assisting in terms of killing lice.
So we have problems, even though we spend 300 million euros a year—that's from the paper I told you about before, by Costello. We have considerable problems in killing lice off in a way that's sufficient to save wild fish.
Peter Heuch, who is a leading expert on the sea lice action plan that they have in Norway, was at the conference as well. He has shown that as farms get larger and larger, they have more and more problems with these chemical treatments. They just do not do the job, and they have been unable to recover their wild fish in Norway because of salmon farming.