LFS Selling Known Diseased Fish? Right/Wrong?

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760fishaddict said:
Im in so cal and I have 3 300 w heaters in my 150g and 1 300w in my 30 gal unless you have a digital thermometer its hard to know for sure what the exact temp is and even then its not exact. My tanks all ways stay at 80 degrees in 5 years I have never seen them go up or down even 1 degree. In my opinion temperature is one of the most important things, there is no way your tank can stay at exactly 79 degrees 24/7 and it only takes a couple degrees up or down to stress your fish out witch makes them more prone to sickness. It would be a good investment you can get a really good one on amazon for like 15$ and its not like they run all the time only when the water temp goes below your desired temp.
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how would my tank drop below 79 if my house doesn't??
 
In the wild water temps can fluctuate on a regular basis, sometimes seasonally, sometimes daily such as during a rain storm, or a cold night. Think about it.

how would my tank drop below 79 if my house doesn't??
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It wouldn't.
 
And getting ich from a LFS should be the least of your concerns.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23294440

Imported ornamental fish are colonized with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.


Abstract
There has been growing concern about the overuse of antibiotics in the ornamental fish industry and its possible effect on the increasing drug resistance in both commensal and pathogenic organisms in these fish. The aim of this study was to carry out an assessment of the diversity of bacteria, including pathogens, in ornamental fish species imported into North America and to assess their antibiotic resistance. Kidney samples were collected from 32 freshwater ornamental fish of various species, which arrived to an importing facility in Portland, Oregon from Colombia, Singapore and Florida. Sixty-four unique bacterial colonies were isolated and identified by PCR using bacterial 16S primers and DNA sequencing. Multiple isolates were identified as bacteria with potential to cause disease in both fish and humans. The antibiotic resistance profile of each isolate was performed for nine different antibiotics. Among them, cefotaxime (16% resistance among isolates) was the antibiotic associated with more activity, while the least active was tetracycline (77% resistant). Knowing information about the diversity of bacteria in imported ornamental fish, as well as the resistance profiles for the bacteria will be useful in more effectively treating clinical infected fish, and also potential zoonoses in the future.

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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And a follow up article from one of those researchers.

Fancy fish could harbor dangerous bacteria
by Rose Eveleth February 6, 2013 03:00am PST



Around the world, private collectors and businesses maintain beautiful fish tanks stocked with colorful corals, speedy little cichlids and stately angelfish. But a hidden danger lurks: many fish that wind up in aquariums carry antibiotic-resistant bacteria that could pose a threat not just to a billion-dollar industry but to human health.

A recent study published in the Journal of Fish Diseases measured 32 different ornamental fish that entered the port in Portland, Ore., from places such as Colombia, Singapore and Florida. The specimen were found to carry 64 different bacterial colonies, and many were resistant to antibiotics to varying degrees. The bottom line: not only were the fish more susceptible to infection, but their bacteria harbored genes that could make them immune to drugs - genes they can pass along.

Resistance to antibiotics can develop in a number of ways, but the most common culprit is overtreatment, a practice commonly used when fish are transported.

The chain of events is pretty easy to follow. The majority of ornamental fish start their lives in Asia and other exotic locations and are shipped all across the globe. Those trips aren’t a walk in the park for the animals, says Luiz Bermudez, a microbiologist at Oregon State University, and one of the researchers on the study.

“It’s stressful even if we humans get in an airplane and fly for 14 hours,” he says, “so when a fish gets to a destination, many times the fish presents with a kind of stress-related disease.”

To prevent stocks from going belly-up before they reach their destination, many importers often proactively treat their catch with antibiotics. That, says Bermudez, is a big driver of the antibiotic resistance his team found in the study.

How antibiotic resistance spreads

It’s not just fish who might be in trouble, either. That’s because a resistant bacterial strain can pass its resistance to another species, Bermudez says.

So, in theory, an antibiotic-resistant fish bacteria could transfer the set of genes that confer that resistance to a bacteria that infects humans, Bermudez says. That means a human bacteria that was formerly felled by certain antibiotics would suddenly become immune to them.

Complicating matters is the fact that many antibiotics used to fight fish bacteria are the same ones widely used on humans. Among the antibiotics that the fish bacteria were best at warding off is Tetracycline, a drug used to treat everything from acne to rosacea to cholera in humans. Up to 77 percent of the studied specimens were resistant to this drug.

While it is unlikely that these bacteria will be transmitted from fish to humans, both fish owners and importers should be extra careful. “If you’re going to clean a fish tank, you should be aware that there is a possibility that you’re going to get some infection,” he says.

Aside from the health implications, antibiotic resistance could be a drain on the bottom line for aquarium suppliers. The global market for ornamental fish is worth an estimated $15 billion each year. The world spends $900 million a year alone on just the live fish - a figure that has grown an average of 14 percent each year for the past 25 years. Should certain fish become entirely resistant to the antibiotics that help them survive, the industry could suffer a huge economic blow totaling millions of dollars.

Bermudez says the ornamental fish industry isn’t deaf to the dangers of antibiotic resistance. It has already made some changes based on his team’s research - such as treating fish less frequently with antibiotics unless necessary and figuring out how to ship them more safely.

But the industry deals with 6,000-plus species of fish, shipping from more than 100 countries, and most countries have no specific regulations regarding antibiotic use. So while individual suppliers might do their part to cut back on antibiotics, many are likely to continue preemptively treating their stocks to avoid disease.

There are still some open questions for researchers studying this antibiotic resistance. For example, Bermudez wants to understand whether or not the bacterial community of imported fish changes after a few weeks at a facility in the United States. Perhaps, he says, importers could eliminate fish with these resistant strains before they are transported to fish tanks across the country, preventing the resistance from spreading

For fish and humans alike, the vicious cycle of antibiotic resistance should be a serious concern. That’s because the fewer antibiotics that work to fight a particular disease, the more likely it is to have a negative impact on the population. The more resistant genes that exist, the more likely other bacteria are to become resistant. The longer suppliers rely on antibiotics to broadly safeguard stocks, the more likely they are to develop resistance.

“So now we’re facing a kind of a crisis situation in the case of humans and animals, that many times we don’t have antibiotics or we only have one antibiotic that can be used to kill the microorganisms that’s causing the infection, and that’s a serious problem,” Bermudez says.
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RD's right. It's one thing if you have an ocean of water, but ponds can fluctuate a lot in temperature between day and night.

If you ever go swimming in a pond in the morning, you'll wish you had waited until the afternoon!

Also, water conducts heat much better than the air, so even if you had decent temperature swings in your house, the water temp wouldn't change nearly as fast as the air. Your tank's temp will always be more stable than your home's air temp.

And to respond to the antibiotics part, that is why you are seeing such a boom in probiotics over the past 20 years. Use good bacteria to out-compete (or sometimes antagonize) the bad ones! No antibiotics required!

A doctor told me that antibiotics are used so liberally in the aquarium trade that people just buy the fish stuff to use on themselves because it's cheaper and easier to obtain than a prescription medication.
 
RD. said:
In the wild water temps can fluctuate on a regular basis, sometimes seasonally, sometimes daily such as during a rain storm, or a cold night. Think about it.



It wouldn't.
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+1. Will likely be higher as the lights and filters will generate heat.

Going go back to the LFS selling fish with ich. I will let the owner aware of this. I will not purchase fish from them until they change the practice of selling fish that are sick. Ich is a disease that can be diagnosed visually. But there are other disease that can not be visually diagnosed. I question how cleanly and correctly they maintain their tanks.
 
I dont think it is right at all. Is it ok if a restaurant sells you post dated food? My LFS will put an X, on their tanks saying NFS if a single fish in the tank has ich (which is common for them since a lot of the fish get that shipping and they have to heal the fish before sale). Selling sick fish is unprofessional and wrong. They should help the fish get better first before the sale, EVEN if the buyer knows the fish are sick.
 
I was reading a article that was saying that a lot of the fish in the trade now have a high resistance to meds that are used due to years of use. I'm sure captive breed has a higher resistance than wild to them.


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FunWow ..... you might want to read post #13. lol
 
as long as you know you need to medicate the fish, they should sell it to you if you want to buy.
that's why we quarantine new fish.
 
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