Fin Rot - Fungal or Bacterial? Need Treatment Safe with Salt...

If anyone is really kind and devoted they can read the thread discussing the events leading up to this problem here, though I imagine most people will prefer the condensed version.

46 gallon bowfront tank, new fish but the tank has been up and running for a year with a filstar xp2 cannister filter. Ammonia, nitrites, and nitrates all 0 (on my test kits and 2 fish store tests, though I'm testing it again at the store today). The pH is 7.4. Fish: (all juvenile) 5 pearl gouramis (Trichogaster leeri), 6 paleatus corydoras, 1 horse-faced loach, 1 rubber lipped pleco, 2 apple snails. Some of these fish are destined for other tanks.

Right now I am working up to 1 level tsp of salt per gallon and 86 F over the past 12-24 hours in order to treat ich, which just showed up yesterday.

The fin rot seems to be a secondary problem from the ich, I had a corydora die from it yesterday at shocking speed. Yesterday morning the fish looked healthy during feeding, by the middle of the day half of the tailfin was missing and the back half of the body was pale, stiff and swollen. By evening the entire tailfin was gone and it was dead. Not having experienced this disease before, I was slow in figuring out what it was, only today realizing what it must be because of another infected fish.

Today the gourami that had the first visible ich spot on its tailfin has an opaque rotted area surrounding the injury that is spreading rapidly. I need to get a treatment and fast. I did add melafix to the water since I read this helps with fin rot and is safe to use with salt and heat treatments.

Treat the whole tank or just the sick fish? Spot application? Dip? Medicated food? I'm currently looking up everything I can find on google but any advice or personal experiences are appreciated.

I prefer the most natural solution possible.

Ah, Crap...

My reading is not going very well... for my fish anyway. I'm worried now that I'll end up losing the entire tank.

From The Skeptical Aquarist:

I'm not the only skeptic when it comes to patent medicines that are supposed to treat bacterial infections of fish: Dr. C. Walker, writing about the laboratory care of Zebrafish (Danio rerio) for biologists--— who are now keeping Zebrafish for genetic studies--— tells these advanced biologists-turned-aquarists--— the same ones, remember, who are able to keep clusters of fish cells alive in a petri dish, "There is no known effective antibiotic to cure mycobacteriosis." Check this at the Zfish site.

Untreatable bacterial infections? This "defeatist attitude" just isn't what anyone wants to hear, and what's worse, it sells no products! Though most of us have firmly-rooted illusions about the effects of our pet "anti-bacterial" patent medications, you might want to keep Dr. Walker's words in mind, as you cruise the shelves at the LFS to see just what "cures" for bacterial diseases corporations are offering you.

Click to expand...

That doesn't bode well, but it is what I suspected. I'm also worried Melafix is a placebo like those "stress coat" forming products, but I haven't found literature proving or disproving that yet.

I'm frustrated I have to keep up a stressful regimen of salt and heat that is probably aggravating the bacterial or fungal problem... but if I don't the ich will certainly be just as detrimental. If anyone can help me, I feel like I know just enough to know I don't know anything here...

Thanks.

From what I've read I am still unsure if melafix helps, but it doesn't seem to hinder. I've about decided I am reaping what I sowed in trying to "quarantine" all these new fish together. Once I get this problem under control I'm going to make sure to always get one set of fish at a time and quarantine them properly. I'm not generally impatient but past luck made me overly optimistic/careless, and my regret isn't doing much to fix the problem.

At least I don't see any other signs of this fin rot issue, and my water tested "clean" again when I went to the LFS earlier. The fish seem a lot more active and less stressed this evening than when I was upping the temp earlier today, which is promising... I hope. I'm theorizing from the symptoms and the info I read that it might be a mycobacteria... which unfortunately doesn't seem to have any cures. If the fish live through this I wonder if I can assume that they built an imunity to it or not.

What ratio of salt to water did you use? I was reading that a lot of ich strains are resistant now - made stronger from improper treatments. I'm at 1 tsp per gallon right now.

I may be overgeneralizing what I read, it probably pertained to the use of pharmaceuticals rather than salt. However, I did think the points made in some articles about using the proper dosage of salt rather than the "teaspoon for luck" type dosages people use constantly is probably true, I don't see how that could cure ich.

I'm having very nice results with the 1 tsp per gallon and 86 F amount of salt, so I think I will stick with that. I was surprised at how fast the visible symptoms disappeared, I didn't remember them going away so quickly last time, maybe I didn't use the same amounts of salt and heat, or maybe my memory is bad... which is entirely likely.

Thanks for the help!