Disease management in shrimp aquaculture has shifted toward antibiotic alternatives — probiotics, vaccines, and biosecurity offer both antimicrobial resistance and welfare benefits.
Shrimp disease management welfare improvements come primarily from prevention rather than treatment. Disease outbreaks causing mass mortality represent significant welfare harm — if shrimp are sentient, mass die-offs from white spot disease, EMS, or vibriosis involve large-scale suffering. Prevention through biosecurity, improved pond management, and probiotic programs reduces both disease prevalence and the welfare harm of mass mortality events. The shift away from antibiotics is simultaneously a welfare benefit (reducing the background disease load that chronic antibiotic exposure can mask) and a public health benefit (reducing antimicrobial resistance). Integrated pest management approaches that use multiple complementary prevention strategies achieve better disease control than relying on any single intervention, whether antibiotic or alternative.