Journal of Fisheries and Life Sciences

Author(s): Lopamudra, Mayuri Behera and Sukanta Kumar Nayak

Abstract: Fish, the fastest food producing sector in the world is one of the richest sources of animal protein. However, diseases are the major bottleneck which causes severe economic loss. Therefore routine surveillance of diseases is extremely important to predict and minimize the adverse effect caused by outbreak, epidemic, and pandemic situations, by adopting suitable and accurate preventive measures. In recent times, serosurveillance the gold standard programme is routinely used to measure the population immunity which in turn complements the traditional disease surveillance methods. Serological studies used to investigate the acquisition of various infections in a population, measure the induction of an immune response in the host, evaluate the persistence of antibody etc. Herein, for the first time possibly an attempt has been made to study the seroprevalence of Aeromonas hydrophila which is widely associated with a wide range of diseases like epizootic ulcerative syndrome, dropsy, fin rot, infection dropsy and hemorrhagic septicemia in several freshwater species. Further, the serological findings were corroborated with bacteriological studies by isolating the A. hydrophila from the disease affected fish exhibiting typical sign and symptoms of aeromoniasis. In this study, 90 sera samples from 10 different disease affected and/or survived freshwater fish species were processed to find out the presence of A. hydrophila antibodies. The findings showed that fish like Labeo rohita, Catla catla, Cyprinus carpio, Hypopthalminthys molitrix etc., were highly seropositive and hence indicated their susceptibility towards this pathogen. Therefore the study provides the evidence that serosurveillance studies could be useful in identifies and they adopting suitable control measures against major diseases of fishes.