Emerging infectious diseases in wildlife populations—and fish in particular—have drawn increasing attention in recent decades (Daszak et al. 2000; Alexander and McNutt 2010; Miller et al. 2014; Tompkins et al. 2015; Krkošek 2017), especially as climate change and biodiversity loss present a shifting context that will almost certainly affect disease dynamics across taxa (Daszak et al. 2000; Miller et al. 2014). Management of infectious disease is especially important when populations of conservation concern are potentially impacted. In this context, healthy and transparent discussion and debate about how scientists, veterinary professionals, conservationists, policymakers, and regulators approach emerging infectious diseases in wildlife are much needed.
Primarily, we are concerned that the perspective offered by Meyers and Hickey (2022) does not adequately consider precautionary management or the conservation status of wildlife populations. Additionally, although Meyers and Hickey recognize some of the potential power of molecular technologies (e.g., next-generation DNA sequencing and quantitative polymerase chain reaction [qPCR]) in finfish disease research, they make several statements and present misconceptions that require clarification, including instances in which relevant details of our own work (Mordecai et al. 2019) are misrepresented or inappropriately discounted.
Drawing on consultation with a confidential group of fish health professionals and administrators, Meyers and Hickey propose that upon molecular detection of a novel infectious agent in fish or shellfish (or a known agent in a new host or setting), a decision pathway should be followed to avoid wasting resources prior to any changes to regulatory policy. Their proposed pathway suggests that an infectious agent should be detected with multiple assays, should be shown to replicate in its host, should be associated with clinical disease and mortality, and should fulfill Koch's postulates of disease causality. In theory, this series of scientific confirmations, which are to be addressed prior to enacting changes in surveillance or regulation, would inform a conceptually valid decision-making pathway. While we welcome guidelines to facilitate management of emerging infectious disease (World Organisation for Animal Health 2021), we argue that the criteria proposed by Meyers and Hickey fail to capture the complex reality of managing emerging infectious diseases in wildlife populations, particularly those of conservation concern, and are not suitable in practice.
Here lies perhaps the most salient point of what we see as our disagreement with Meyers and Hickey: while the decision pathway that they propose seems (to us) to err on the side of avoiding false positives (where infectious agent risks are truly low and changes to policy or mana
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