Navigating aquaculture health: Farm‐friendly framework for risk‐based management

Risks to animal health are concerns for any agricultural system. Mitigation of these risks protects and improves population health and productivity, as well as opportunities for trade. Directing health management attention and resources to identify and address risk has the potential to achieve great impact for the least cost; however, risk‐based strategies are varied and often complex. This study proposes a unified framework for risk‐based aquaculture health management along with intuitive decision support tools to ease farm implementation. Termed Comprehensive Aquaculture Health Protection and Surveillance (CAHPS), this framework supports the design of risk‐based strategies that are customized to an operation's unique circumstances yet geared to establish equivalency with World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) standards. A series of decision metrics guides the establishment of pillars foundational to animal health management. Another set of decision metrics guides (1) the estimation of an aquaculture operation's probability of introducing pathogens of concern, and (2) the identification of opportunities to improve and/or credit biosecurity accordingly. CAHPS is compliant with WOAH standards, adaptive to a variety of farming environments, and, through its decision metrics, streamlined for farm implementation. Herein, we describe the principles of CAHPS and demonstrate its ability to discern an operation's suitability for pathogen freedom claims, reduce surveillance expense according to risk, and prioritize biosecurity strategies with the greatest likely impact on population health. Through CAHPS, the proper accounting of risk can advance in tandem two ostensibly competing goals: safeguarding animal health and reducing the costs of its management. CAHPS also provides a uniform framework for farm demonstration of a distinct health status, which, with Competent Authority oversight and approval, can support compartmentalization. As decision metrics were designed to err in a conservative direction, we expect future studies to improve precision but not nullify pathogen freedom claims resulting from this logical framework.