Early mortality syndrome (EMS) is a result of poor management practices in shrimp farming in Vietnam and several other countries. Here a combination of adverse factors in nutrition, biosecurity, host physiology, and especially microbial management leads to a situation where opportunistic pathogens such as Vibrio parahaemolyticus can bloom and dominate the microbiota around and inside the shrimp. When additional virulence factors such as colonisation of the stomach and toxin production are added to this setting, diseases such as acute hepatopancreas necrosis (AHNPD) will cause severe losses.
For more than a decade, INVE Aquaculture has been working on the treatment of ‘traditional’ vibriosis. Hence it was a logical
step to extrapolate our established pro- and metaphylactic treatments to this new variant of Vibrio. When applying Sanolife
PRO-2 probiotics in the field, as part of a holistic intervention protocol, a significant amount of empirical data of the beneficial
action of Bacillus probiotics during shrimp culture has been collected (Lavens et al. 2014). In this study, we measured the
effects of Sanolife probiotics in a standardised AHPND challenge model under controlled laboratory conditions.