How major shrimp diseases including EMS and WSSV cause welfare harm and what biosecurity practices reduce their impact.
Shrimp disease welfare is doubly challenging: there is ongoing scientific debate about shrimp sentience, and the scale of shrimp farming — hundreds of billions of animals — means that even modest per-animal welfare improvements aggregate to enormous welfare benefit if sentience is accepted. EMS kills shrimp through acute hepatopancreatic tissue destruction; WSSV causes systemic viral infection — both are rapid-onset conditions that cause physiological stress measurable even in invertebrates. The welfare and food safety case against routine antibiotic use in shrimp farming converge: antibiotics mask the management failures that create disease pressure, deplete microbial diversity that supports healthy pond ecology, and contaminate the human food supply with resistance genes.