National Cheng Kung University signed a deal with a Middle East-based firm yesterday to improve aquacultural quality in the Red Sea by using an oral vaccine for fish developed at the school.
University chancellor Michael Lai (
Lead researcher Yang Huey-lang (
Yang said antibiotics used to be injected directly into fish to deter disease, but such methodswere costly and time consuming.
To boost efficiency, his team developed a new vaccine delivery system that implants the vaccine in the biotic feedstuff fed to the brine shrimp eaten by the fish.
The new vaccine delivery system is very efficient because it can vaccinate a large mass of fish in less than 20 minutes, he said.
It has been successful on more than 60,000 groupers and cobia in the past three years, he said.
Yang said he hopes to develop more vaccines to fight against other fish diseases.
James Greenberg, the director of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabia-based venture-development firm DevCorp, said the vaccine was the "savior" of the aquacultural industry because people no longer want antibiotic-laced fish on their dinner tables.
He said Taiwan has one of the best aquaculture technology bases in the world, but volatile weather, industrial pollution and the lack of usable coast line has hampered the expansion of the Taiwanese aquacultural industry.
Saudi Arabia's Red Sea is a prime location for fish farms because of its pristine water, calm weather, and low-cost land, he said. Moreover, the bacteria count in the Red Sea is 100 times less than Taiwanese waters, he said.
Yang said his team is collaborating with a local firm to export the oral vaccines and the vaccinated fish larvae to Saudi Arabia.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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