Sure. I think it's important, first of all, to put this into a bit of context. Then I'll answer about what our plans are at this particular point in time and how we plan to look at this going forward.
The context is that everyone has received information that two fish out of 48 samples sent to a lab in eastern Canada returned a positive test result for ISA. Now, what does that mean? Well, it stands in contrast to our existing testing done on our farm sites. What I'm talking about here is the government of B.C., and now Canada, who have a random audit program that involves their going to farms in British Columbia and taking samples of fish every month. They've been doing this for years and years, and have examined 4,700 samples since 2003, with 70 more added each month, for a variety of diseases, including the presence of ISA. All of those samples have been examined for the presence of ISA. All of them have come back negative. It means that we as an industry are in the position of having a lot of information from all of our farm sites, all of which have shown no ISA. So we're surprised by the positive test.
The other thing is that the information we have about ISA and its effect on wild salmon in the Pacific region is that it has a very low effect, almost insignificant. The studies that have been done with Pacific salmon and Atlantic salmon exposed to ISA show that the Atlantic salmon suffer greatly, and the Pacific salmon not so much—it's almost insignificant for them.
This makes us very curious about these tests. We want to see the tests replicated, which is the normal process when you get a positive. You do an independent test to find if the result is replicated with another positive test. Then if you get that test, which is a tiny piece of the DNA indicating that you might have that virus, you move to replicating the entire DNA of the virus. None of this has been done yet.
If this is done and we know what variant of ISA it is, then we can start to discover the next steps that are going to be useful. From our perspective, we certainly don't want to see ISA transferred to our farms, so we would want to see if this is a pathogenic or a non-pathogenic form, and what steps we need to take to make sure it's not going to be transferred to our farms and our fish.
In parallel, we want to ensure that the public knows that these 4,700 tests are not wrong. We're perfectly willing, and are starting to take steps now, to step up the amount of testing on our farm sites, to ensure that we can verify even more samples than the 4,700 we have had over time and know what's happening today on every farm site so that we can be doubly sure that we don't have it on our farm sites.
As I say, beyond that, we need to know what this is and what steps can be taken. In the past, our industry has successfully developed vaccines that we inject into our fish to protect them against locally and naturally occurring bacterial infection. In the case of the IHN virus carried by sockeye in British Columbia, we developed a vaccine against that. So that's something that we would look to down the road as a management response, but until we have all of this other information.... We need to get the results of the tests.