Bacteria On Cruise Ships

If these bacteria multiply exponentially and are not removed then they spoil the living condition on ship making it.

Bacteria on cruise ships. The symptoms seem to suggest norovirus a highly contagious condition that has been responsible for gastrointestinal cruise ship outbreaks in the past. Cruise ships are a hotbed of bacteria and potential illnesses but the deadliest may be Legionnaires Disease an infection caused by Legionella organisms that leads to severe pneumonia. It is a known fact that there are certain types of bacteria which flourish in the air conditioning system of a ship.

From 2008 to 2014 74 million passengers sailed on cruise ships in the Vessel Sanitation Programs jurisdiction. Solid waste is held in storage tanks with aerobic bacteria which begins digesting it while waiting for the return to port. People often associate cruise ships with acute gastrointestinal illnesses such as norovirus but acute gastrointestinal illness is relatively infrequent on cruise ships.

Prior to the early 1970s most outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness were due to inadequate food handling and water sanitation. Lindblad Expeditions has a new selling point that might grab your attention. That same month Royal Caribbean also reported that two of its cruise ships had Norwalk-like virus outbreaks.

Infections causing gastroenteritis can be viral bacterial or parasitic in origin. Cruise operators are familiar with cleaning a ship after an outbreak of an infectious virus. Carnival the troubled cruise line has another headache on its hands after a passenger filed a lawsuit alleging that flesh eating bacteria nearly took his leg in 2011.

With thousands of people onboard a ship there is a need for a sophisticated approach to managing where everything goes once people are done with it from human waste to recycling to leftover food. To find out where germs may lurk aboard cruise ships the Rossen Reports team went undercover on a four-day Caribbean cruise armed with test swabs and an official bacteria meter. To protect themselves from infections and reduce the spread of GI illnesses on cruise ships passengers should be counseled on the following.

David Gray Reuters Tab Lankford who was on the ship Paradise claims he contracted hot tub folliculitis from a Carnival whirlpool. Unlike most contagions this illness is not spread through person to person contact though this may happen on rare occasions. In a recent cluster of gastrointestinal illnesses on a cruise ship sailing from Tenerife to the US salmonella was identified as the likely culprit.