It might be worth your time to get a second opinion via a microscope and a DVM with aquaculture experience. I had similar problem years a ago in 1500 gallon display. It was Tricodina a protozoa that lives on the fish and eats dead skin cells on the fish. It is a symbiotic relationship until water quality changes....such as a difficult water change or rise in water temperature. Then the protozoa becomes pathogenic and the population starts to explode as it starts to perforate the cell walls. White spots, rapid breathing, subdural hemmoraging, loss of buoyancy control, finally internal organs shut down and the fish dies. Then the protozoa goes into the water column looking for a new meal.
In my case we hooked up a chiller and U.V. to the systems and problems solved. The protozoa did not respond to traditional medication but once the environmental problems were taken care of we no longer had a problem. Dr. at Washington State University helped diagnose and provide direction for solutions.
Cost me thousands of dollars to overcome and correct but money well spent for the customer in the long haul. There are many on this site that think going fallow is the only protocol but your own experience and several others on this site have proven that this attempt at prophylaxis often does not work. Nuking the tank and killing the biodiversity is problematic as it is impossible to treat for any possible pathogen and not harm the fishes natural immune system. Fish in nature (one cubic milliliter sample) are exposed to 10 million viruses, one million bacteria, and about 1000 small protozoas, and algae. (Source Microbial research www.coastalwiki.org) It makes more sense to control factors you can not see by limiting explosions of opportunistic protozoa populations through environmental control in large fish populations. This is nature does every day without drugs. Better to understand nature than to fight it in our Glass or Acrylic mini oceans.
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