Is it time to modernize how we define salmon health?

Pacific salmon face multiple factors (or determinants) that can affect their health including climate change, pollution, habitat loss, disease, and fishing pressures. Yet in Canada, legislation and policies trying to measure and manage salmon health only consider whether the fish have disease or not or if there are enough salmon available to fish.

This perspective is significantly different from modern views of health in people, livestock, or wildlife — health is now viewed as a sum of the many factors that affect individuals’ and populations’ ability to cope with all of life’s stressors and still be able to live and thrive.

We reviewed policy and political opportunities and obstacles to change how salmon health is viewed; change is more likely to be accepted and implemented if a receptive context for change exists.

Although we found legislation and policies concerned with many of the determinants of salmon health (e.g., access to food/habitat, fishing pressures), none of the documents considered the determinants as cumulative effects, and there were no ways proposed to manage health holistically.

Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.

Responsibility for salmon health falls onto Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and there are clear political and policy priorities to manage salmon health.

We recently developed a Determinants of Health model for fish and wildlife that would be applicable to salmon health management; our model could guide the modernization of DFO programs to look at health as a sum of factors (or cumulative effects of many determinants).

Public health faced a similar modernization challenge over 50 years ago.

The successful use of a cumulative effects perspective for public health policy could guide DFO on how to reframe and integrate existing policies and promote the perspective that health is a multifactorial phenomenon that helps salmon deal with life’s challenges.

Read the full paper — Is Fisheries and Oceans Canada policy receptive to a new Pacific salmon health perspective? by Julie Wittrock, Michele Anholt, Michael Lee and Craig Stephen.