Cruises: Floating Petri Dishes

Above, the Majesty of the Seas docked in Key West, Florida. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

The outbreak of the coronavirus aboard a Celebrity cruise ship in Yokohama has focused attention on people getting sick aboard cruise ships in general.

I've been on two cruises and both times I came down with a bug. I caught a flu during a 2000 cruise to Alaska and a cold during last year's cruise to Key West and Havana. Thankfully, neither were serious, but they did make me hesitant about taking a cruise again.

Outbreaks of different diseases aboard cruise ships is the topic of an article in Japan Today. As their article describes, cruise ships are "floating petri dishes."

They wrote:

HONG KONG - Deadly viruses, chickenpox outbreaks and mass cases of the runs: Sometimes luxury cruise ship holidays are not the trips of a lifetime elderly passengers had hoped for. 

Cruise-goers have fallen sick en masse in the past, their predicament on the high seas coming into sharp focus because the holidays can cost thousands of dollars and are often marketed as trips of a lifetime. 

"Cruise ships are very prone to outbreaks of common cold and the vomiting virus," said John Oxford, professor of virology at Queen Mary University of London. "Invariably the ships are overcrowded and with so many passengers, hygiene levels can slip." 

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) logged eight outbreaks aboard cruise ships last year of the highly contagious norovirus, which causes vomiting and diarrhea -- hardly the stuff of a dream holiday. 

Measles, E. coli, chickenpox and salmonella poisoning have all broken out on cruises in recent years.

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