In order to safeguard the health and well-being of fish and shellfish farmers, other stakeholders, and Cefas staff, and following advice from government, the routine aquatic animal health inspection programmes have been suspended until further notice. Aquaculture production businesses (APB's) in England and Wales will not receive their customary disease surveillance and compliance inspection visits by the Fish Health Inspectorate. However, Inspectors will be contacting APB's, endeavouring to remotely check records, complete aspects of compliance where feasible and ascertain the status of stocks onsite. We are grateful for your co-operation in this matter. We will continue to review our field programme week by week considering the current and changing situation with Coronavirus.
The Fish Health Inspectorate has essential statutory field duties that will continue to be delivered while government measures for the control of Coronavirus allow. Specifically, this is emergency response to serious disease outbreaks and disease control, support to the export trade, and business critical authorisation inspections. We have implemented additional sanitary measures to protect the health of stakeholders and Cefas staff while delivering this work following government advice regarding personal measures to mitigate the risk of COVID-19. Office based staff are working from home, however, our office services remain open and delivering business as usual for administration and queries relating to authorisation, registration, trade.
All suspicion of notifiable disease in fish, molluscs and crustacea must be reported to the FHI in the usual way.
