I was all set to write a brief little ditty about those sexy new PETA postage stamps ("Pamela Anderson AND Bob Barker? Consider my Holidaze shopping done, baby). Then I unfolded my clutch of daily dead tree to see a serious looking banner headline. "Canada Kept Salmon Threat Secret" For those just now checking in, I got hooked by that story breakthrough last month while looking at other viruses attacking specific agribusinesses with similarly devastating effects. The prospect of this salmon-targeting disease (named Infectious Salmon Anemia or "ISA") packed the added punch of possibly making the leap from farmed salmon populations to the much more valuable and previously safe-seeming wild salmon populations. Today's headline alludes to the fact that Canadian researchers have actually known about ISA being in wild salmon for a decade. One pesky research fellow found it present in tested fish back in 2002. The good news is that it may be a harmless natural variation of ISA that's always been out there. Where the story gets sexy is when the push to publish the findings maybe encountered the faint possibility that Canada's regulatory bureaucracy kept it hidden. This small tempest must nonetheless be swirling around the fishing taverns and coffeeshops today. Yarrr! For me, the takeaway jibes with my experience that emerging viral threats to an agribusiness leave those farmers feeling almost totally powerless. The teachable moment being that if researchers and bureaucrats dink around with that research because of some unseen benefit for keeping things silent...well, that's just a disservice to everyone.

If you have anything to do with fishing or the consumption of fish, the recent news of a disease being spotted in Pacific wild salmon in the general vicinity of the Northwest has to freak you out. That is, it should - if you listen to the experts and the front page news in Seattle over the past week. The concern is a disease called "infectious salmon anemia" or ISA. It has devastated farmed Atlantic salmon populations in Scandinavia and South America. This is the first time it's been seen in North America. Once it shows up, fish act like normal but then die in droves. It lands on my conversational plate not only because I consume wild salmon like a family of brown bears. I'm also becoming attuned to the problems of these sorts of animal industry disease threats. Some well-informed readers might suggest the mental leap to link ISA with "mad cow disease" in terms of separate but equal threats. But what little I know allows even me to see that's a tough epidemiological stretch to make. The link is true, however, in the fact that such diseases share the characteristic of being able to devastate an industry. No matter what you may think about animal industries, these viral threats can knock the snot out of a population. Plus for me, the larger point comes around metaphorically, given that I've been looking at another industry-specific disease with quite similar and equally devastating effects ("aleutian disease virus" or ADV). Which leads me to ask if other examples come to mind. Just yell 'em out - I'd love to hear them. Or we can all just freak out separately, as we fill our respective bomb shelters with wild salmon jerky and vancomycin.