Outbreak: The virus threatening life on the water

Updated

The men and women who farm by the Logan River and fish the bay to the north faced ruin in the last outbreak of white spot disease. Government failures and ruthless importers mean they're waiting for the day it strikes again and destroys their way of life — forever.

Baked into the clay are souvenirs: a dry mollusc shell, a thicket of barnacles, now bleached by the sun, the fossil-like outline of a carapace.

Until last year these craters had been full, and teemed with life.

Season by season, for three decades, the ponds produced vast numbers of prawns: black and brown tiger prawns, and kuruma prawns native to the Indian Ocean.

Serena Zipf (pictured below with her father-in-law and husband) now fears her family's Logan River farm is but a lost heirloom.

"This is a family that's had a very proud history, 150 years old, of growing food," she tells Four Corners.

In April 2017, the Zipfs stood helplessly beside Queensland Biosecurity officials as contractors pumped thousands of litres of chlorine into their ponds. The stock had become infected with white spot.

"Everything had to be euthanised," she says.

"We had thousands of fish, dead fish, floating to the surface and we had millions of prawns that died.



"To even contemplate that it would come to an end was beyond devastating, not just for us, for the people who come before us, but also for our children, and our grandchildren."

In 1992 the exotic virus emerged for the first time in China. In the two decades since, it has been welcomed into Thailand, Indonesia and Japan as one might a plague. It's not harmful to humans, but it is highly virulent and has ravaged economies.

Once it was detected in November 2016 at a property just up the road from the Zipf place, the Logan River prawn farms fell to the contagion, one by one, week by week.

Serena remembers holding her breath for the bad news.

"It was almost like watching a train wreck in slow motion coming towards you," she says.

"You knew it would hit you sooner or later, but you just didn't know when."

In the end, it took 12 weeks. In February 2017, the Zipf farm was the last to fall.



"We've been beating a path down to Canberra for 20 years warning them that this disease was coming," she says bitterly.

"Asking them, begging them, to ban imported green prawns to buy us time."

But Canberra never did.

Now, the damage to the Zipfs and their neighbours has ticked over the $40 million mark — thus far.

Days or weeks before the first carcass was spotted floating in a pond, a fisher upstream on the Logan had wiled away a morning with a rod and a line.

They made their way through a bag of imported prawns, threading them one by one on a hook, and casting them into the dun-coloured water. They could never have known the prawns carried the virus.

Investigators later reckoned it was most likely the bait had come from a local supermarket, where prawns are, incredibly, cheaper than in tackle shops.

The bait not stolen by elusive yellowfin was cannibalised from the floor of the river by wild prawns. Once the contagion took hold there was little anyone could have done to stop it.

"As more and more farms went under," marine scientist Ben Diggles remembers, "it became clear … the virus was coming in through the intake water."

Mr Diggles' finding was the first strong indication the outbreak did not come from the ponds.

Over the months that followed, as evidence mounted the virus had indeed come from imported prawns, few were surprised.

The meagre defences at the border had long been a sore point.

While consignments were meant to be subject to virus testing in order to pass quarantine inspection, it gradually became apparent there were holes in the regime.

Raw prawns which were marinated or battered weren't required to be tested. The whole apparatus relied on an overworked frontline. Inspectors weren't given warm clothing needed to operate in a minus 30-degree freezer peeling open prawn cartons.

Most obvious of all: the government had been authorising importers to unload their containers unsupervised. It gave them days or weeks in which to fiddle with the stock before an inspector showed up.

A 2007 Queensland government survey had identified white spot in almost 90 per cent of all prawns sold in supermarkets. Nine years later, secret tests conducted by the Federal Government showed no improvement; the virus was coming in practically unchecked.

By 2017, in the face of a full-blown crisis, a picture slowly emerged of a thriving black-market. In fact, huge volumes of diseased and untested prawns had been arriving at the country's wharves for years.



For years, frustrated importers had been tipping off the Department of Agriculture to what they knew of smugglers beating the system. They were bitter at ruthless undercutting on prices which should never have been viable for any business playing by the rules.

Their allegations had legs. By March 2016 — almost a whole year before the outbreak — the department's investigators had launched two secret operations targeting a slew of rogue importers.

More than 85 per cent of the supermarket prawns they were testing came back positive for white spot. By year's end, the import permits of six major prawn importers were under scrutiny. Those six had handled almost half of all uncooked prawns imported into the country that year.

"From what I know of the economics of the international prawn market," former biosecurity official Brian Jones says, "the profits to be made from bringing prawns into Australia are so great that people will find any means they can to get them across the border without being tested".

For years there had been little chance of getting caught.

Mr Jones was brought in last year from New Zealand to assist an arms-length inquiry into the outbreak by the Inspector-General of Biosecurity. He was staggered by the profits to be had.

"I was willing to accept that there might be one or two who would be deliberately avoiding the bureaucracy. But to have such a large number of importers … to be deliberately gaming the system, you have to ask why," he said.

Elementary online sleuthing produced evidence bulk shipments of prawns were selling at perilously low prices.

"These are low-grade prawns, you don't want them inspected by anybody, they probably glow in the dark," Mr Jones says.

"But … if you can get them across the border and past Biosecurity Australia, then you're rich."

Mr Jones says it's the kind of research the government had failed to do.

"The department was, as far as I'm aware, unaware of the financial incentive to game the system," he said.

In the report Mr Jones co-authored, the Inspector-General put it like this: "The department demonstrated a remarkable level of naivety about the potential for importers to wilfully circumvent import conditions."

Yet even when the department did finally cotton to the abuses, and as samples kept returning with a positive finding, the department remained silent. It told no-one on the Logan.

The effect was tragic. Queensland wasn't forewarned the virus was here — not the farmers and not the state government. Precautions which might have been taken were not.

The department feared if it talked it might jeopardise the success of criminal charges it eventually laid against just one small Melbourne company, but it was a terrible miscalculation.

"It's not just the economic loss, we're not just talking dollars and cents," Ms Zipf says.

"We're talking about the emotional trauma of having to euthanize your own crop.

"That was totally negligent."

It wasn't until the outbreak in Queensland that bold actions were finally taken. For six months last year, trade in uncooked prawns was suspended altogether. Shipments were turned around at Australian ports. And when trade resumed, the privilege of handling stock prior to inspection was rescinded.

It was all too late of course. The Logan River precinct might never farm prawns again.

In March last year, the Queensland Government's advisers warned "total eradication of the virus" was "increasingly unlikely".

And if it hasn't yet taken hold in the wild, there's plenty more of it landing on our door.

In late May, the Department of Agriculture quietly released a note which said 12 consignments of prawns — stopped at the wharves under a so-called "enhanced" biosecurity regime — had tested positive for the disease.

What's more troubling is it seems other consignments did get through.

Four Corners commissioned a genetics professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Wayne Knibb, to test a set of random samples purchased from supermarkets.

Thirty per cent came back with positive traces of the virus.

Almost two years after the outbreak, the Government has yet to extend viral testing to prawns, including those tested by Professor Knibb, which have been marinated, breaded or crumbed.

It says it will begin that testing in September.

"We have a route of a virus [that] has damaged whole national economies, and it's cost billions of dollars," he says.

It means that almost two years after the outbreak first took hold in Queensland, another contagion could happen again tomorrow.

"We're playing with fire," Professor Knibb says.

Under world trade rules, Australia must conduct a two-year surveillance program to demonstrate "proof of freedom" from the disease. If achieved, we regain our status as white spot-free.

Until then, an exclusion zone has been pegged out over a vast area of south-east Queensland.

It prevents fishers trawling both the river and the adjoining Moreton Bay [pictured above] from selling their prawns into the lucrative seafood markets of Sydney and Melbourne.

But in April, the world trade clock had to be reset, again.

The virus was detected 65 kilometres to the north of the Logan River's now-unrecognisable prawn farms. This time, surveyors discovered it not in an aquaculture pond, but in wild populations of prawns and crabs in the northern reaches of the bay.

Snared inside the exclusion zone, fisherman Derek Adcock fumes that seafood from the very countries which might have been the source of the virus faces no such restriction.

"We can't export our product to Sydney but the product that comes here from China … can go wherever it wants. How is that fair?"

He despairs for the future of what he describes as "some of the cleanest waters in the world".

"If that [virus] escapes into the deep water down on the east coast here, it's going to be devastating," Mr Adcock says.

The Department of Agriculture said it would continue to review import conditions, and "acknowledged significant shortcomings in its handling of this issue and has taken substantial action to address them".

It also said it could never eliminate altogether the risk of diseases such as white spot entering Australia.

"The conditions are designed to reduce the biosecurity risk to a level that is very low, but not zero," a spokesperson said.

Watch Linton Besser's investigation, Outbreak, on Four Corners at 8.30pm on ABC TV or on ABC iview.

EDITOR'S NOTE (2/7/2018): This story was amended to include the commencement date of viral testing for marinated, crumbed and breaded prawns.

Credits

Reporter: Linton Besser

Photography: Tim Leslie and Megan Kinninment

Camera Operator: Louie Eroglu, ACS

Digital Producer: Brigid Andersen

Topics: fishing-aquaculture, pests-diseases-and-control-methods, federal-government, law-crime-and-justice, woongoolba-4207, australia, qld, brisbane-4000, maroochydore-4558

First posted