Deliverable 3.4 - Prophylactic practices for Mediterranean farmed fish

Prophylaxis can be defined as all the actions taken to prevent disease and therefore can be considered as a synonym of disease prevention. Biosecurity is also related to disease prevention but mainly consists of actions that minimize the risk of introduction and spreading of an infectious disease in a particular place and also spreading to other places. In aquaculture, therefore, biosecurity should be mainly related to those practices aiming at reducing the risk of specific infectious and parasitic diseases, whereas disease prevention and prophylaxis should be viewed with a wider scope, including measures and actions to reduce the susceptibility to infectious diseases and also non-infectious diseases and factors such as stress or environmental conditions, that are closely related to the emergence and expression of the diseases. Prophylaxis, disease prevention and biosecurity should also be clearly differentiated from disease treatments and disease remediation, although in cases, certain measures and tools are used to prevent and also to treat. Treating European sea bass and gilthead seabream diseases has been already addressed in D3.3 of PerformFISH, i.e. Deliverable 3.3 “Best Therapeutics Practices for Mediterranean Farmed Fish”.