7-27 SS Lethal IHNV

  A virus that is found in Northwest freshwaters that could be deadly to steelhead, rainbows Brown’s, cutthroat and salmon. Managers at Wallowa Hatchery euthanized 42,000 legal-sized rainbow trout on Thursday, after a number of fish died from the Infectious Hematopoietic Necrosis Virus.

IHNV is a naturally occurring virus found throughout the Snake River Basin.  Some fish carry it for their entire life without any health problems. However, it can sometimes cause significant mortality when virus numbers in the water supply are high.

Here’s hatchery manager Ron Harrod:  “We don’t know what the future holds for us here at our facility but we are going to bring in some test fish and have our pathology department check them throughout the year, were going to do that for a couple of the year period and if we get a clean bill of health, production will resume as normal. We want to be cautious with the virus. We do not want to spread that two areas where we know that it is not naturally occurring and do the right thing for the natural environment. We want to be stewards of it and not spread this around because currently we don’t have any known therapy to treat the fish with that will have any effect on the virus. In the natural environment we haven’t seen big losses from that in the natural streams because the densities are probably lower but it is still something we definitely do not want if we know that we have it we definitely do not want to put in water bodies that it may occur. We know rainbow carry it. But do steelhead too? It does occur.