UW Sea Grant funding Winnebago system research on VHS fish disease

Four years after the deadly fish disease viral hemorrhagic septicemia (VHS) was first diagnosed in Wisconsin, researchers are returning to the Lake Winnebago system, the site of that discovery, to learn if the virus is still a threat and to develop a faster, cheaper test to detect its presence as a management tool. The Wisconsin general fishing opener is Saturday, May 7 and while the test would not be available for this year's fishing season, it could be in use for future seasons. "Our main goal is to develop an antibody test that lets us know whether the VHS virus was present in a fish population, and that won't require any fish to be killed," says Tony Goldberg , a University of Wisconsin-Madison veterinary school epidemiologist and one of the principal investigators. "That's especially important for valuable and large game fish like musky and walleye." Goldberg says the researchers also want to learn whether the VHS virus is still active in fish in Lake Winnebago, and to understand when in a calendar year the virus poses the biggest threat to fish. Such predictive abilities could offer a new way to monitor and manage VHS throughout all of Wisconsin's waters, and could be offered to resource managers around the Great Lakes basin, country and world, he says. Goldberg is working with Sue Marcquenski, fish health specialist for the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Kathy Kurth of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory and Anna Wilson, a UW-Madison graduate student who previously worked with Marcquenski.