In Canada, the United States, Ireland, and many other countries, the dangers posed by artificially farmed salmon continue to be the stuff of media reporting in all its many forms, press, radio, television, and e-zines.

July 2003 was no exception. From the Pacific to the Atlantic, stories of diseased farm bred salmon were everywhere.

Two merit special attention.

In the State of Maine in the USA thousands of salmon from local fish pens were shipped to New Brunswick, Canada, to be processed for human consumption.

What is so dangerous about that? Well, it's like this. The salmon carried an infectious anemia virus. The virus is deadly to the fish. But, according to a spokesman for the New Brunswick Salmon Growers' Association, "The virus could never live in our body temperature".

What a relief!

AIDS jumped from infected apes to humans. Bovine encephalitis jumped from "mad cows" to humans, even after their meat was processed and cooked. But the deadly virus in farmed salmon, we are told, could never live in our body temperature.

Would you feed these fish to your children? Would you even think about feeding virus infected salmon to your children?

The second story comes from Ireland.

FISSTA, the Federation of Irish Salmon and Sea Trout Anglers, is concerned, and rightly so, that a "mystery" killing of 300,000 farmed salmon in Inver Bay, in Donegal, may lead to the total destruction of the wild salmon and sea trout stocks in the whole of Donegal Bay.

Three fish farms are located in Inver Bay. Last year thousands of farmed salmon died there, and their diseased bodies were released into the waters of the bay and allowed to sink.

FISSTA chairman Noel Carr, a leading proponent in the campaign to regenerate wild salmon stock in the River Erne, said 50,000 mature farmed salmon had been decomposing on the seabed for more than 13 months.

"It is not surprising that this present fish kill is in the same area as the last incident which has been allowed to pass without any adequate state investigation or sanction," he added.

No definite finding has yet been made on the cause of the two seasons of farmed salmon deaths.

To the publisher of this web page, a Donegal man, it is incomprehensible that diseased fish were allowed to decompose in the waters of Donegal Bay. Over fifty years ago when diseased salmon were trapped in the receding waters of the Erne River following completion of the Erne Scheme hydroelectric project, they were placed in a pit and incinerated. The story is told on this web page in "The Day the Salmon Died". He, and many others still living, witnessed the scene.

Our forefathers were much more cognizant of the hazard posed to the wild stock by diseased fish than present-day salmon farmers.

With regard to the latter, and to paraphrase James Stephens in his poem "Righteous Anger":

"May the High King of Glory permit them to get the mange."

Maybe then they would realize how their salmon feel.

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