Whether it will give the scientific basis for the issue of a licence by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency for the use of Callicide…

Calicide is the trade name given to a medicine used to treat sea lice infestations on farmed salmon grown in marine fish cages. The active ingredient in Calicide is teflubenzuron, a chitinase inhibitor which acts by inhibiting the formation of chitin in the exoskeleton of insects and crustacea. It affects the moulting stages of these organisms and therefore is effective in treating sea lice particularly when they are progressing through the various juvenile growth stages.It is administered to the fish by coating the fish feed. As the compound is then subsequently discharged to the marine environment via fish faeces or any uneaten food pellets, it constitutes part of the trade effluent discharged from the fish farm premises and must be authorised by a consent if the fish farm operator is to avoid contravening section 30F of the Control of Pollution Act 1974. To obtain a consent, a fish farmer must submit an application to the Scottish Environment Protection Agency.Calicide is an authorised fish medicine, having been through a rigorous assessment by the Veterinary Medicines Directorate of its general safety (including consumer, environment and operator safety) and its efficacy as a sea lice treatment. The manufacturer is obliged to carry out a full ecotoxicological risk assessment and submit a detailed safety case demonstrating compliance with all aspects before a marketing authorisation is issued. It is this process which is generally referred to when medicines are labelled as being "licensed" or not. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency approached the setting of consent conditions for Calicide according to the recognised method. It is based on risk management, and began with the Agency's own ecotoxicological risk assessment, using data from both laboratory and field experiments requested from the manufacturers to derive a safe environmental concentration (often referred to as an environmental quality standard). The derivation of the environmental quality standard involved the identification of the most susceptible species through screening a range of marine animals, establishing the concentration of chemical at which there is no observable toxic effect, then applying a further safety factor to achieve the standard. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency then commissioned the Water Research Centre to carry out a peer review of this assessment. The Agency accepted changes proposed by the Centre.The Agency then used predictive modelling techniques to estimate the limits which must be imposed on a particular discharge to prevent the environmental quality standard being breached. Restrictions have been placed on the quantity of Calicide which can be used in any particular treatment. The treatment method relies on the concept of a mixing zone (often now referred to as an "allowable zone" of effects) within which it is accepted that standards may be exceeded. In this way the Scottish Environment Protection Agency has endeavoured to protect the environment from significant harm and in doing so protect species which are exploited commercially by "capture" fishing techniques. The site-by-site discharge consent complements the Veterinary Medicine Directorate's general marketing authorisation approach.