FAQ Prawns posing possible disease threat?

This is a compilation of forum posts from our old site.
Troppo
Dec 13, 2006

Today I read an interesting article in a Queensland newspaper that crabbers(particularly Australian crabbers) who feed their crabs prawns, may like to read. Below is an excerpt.

Prawns posing disease threat.
The increased volume and decreased price of imported green prawns has further escalated the risk of spreading the diseases, white spot syndrome and taura syndrome to the state’s prawn stocks.

The Department of Fisheries and Primary Industries has initiated it’s own testing and sampling program as a measure to protect prawn stocks with traces of both the diseases being found in many test batches bought from supermarkets.

Below are two links for each of these diseases,

White Spot Syndrome

Viral Diseass Taura Syndrome

It shows in the white spot syndrome article that this disease can affect crustaceans such as crabs.
With the article on Taura syndrome,it doesn’t say whether this disease affects crustaceans,but the symptoms do appear similar(but perhaps not the same disease as the problem appeared after feeding oysters) to the symptoms some of my crabs had before and after death over a month ago.

Ladybug15057
Thank you for sharing this Troppo. Extremely interesting reading, and a link within the links you provided has a bit more detail about “Diseases of Crustaceans Listed by the OIE”

Diseases of Crustaceans

Vanessa
Prawns are crustaceans so I would say it is very likely it could affect hermit crabs. Most experts say that with the shell disease (or black spot) with crabs and lobsters that the cooked meat is ok for human consumption. The blurb above mentioned ‘green’ prawns which means uncooked or raw. Perhaps the best method is to cook the prawns rather than offer them raw?

Troppo
Ahhhh that’s great Vanessa, so there shouldn’t be any need to worry about that report,instead just cook the prawns and it should be ok?
With shell disease,that’s caused by bacteria which would be killed during cooking,but with white spot and taura syndrome which are both virus’s,would the virus’s be destroyed during cooking?