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Voyage Outbreak Reports by Ship Only
Describing a cruise ship voyage is relatively easy. A voyage has a place and date of embarkation (initial boarding) and final disembarkation (final destination), total crew and passengers on-board and the self-reported incidence by the ship medical staff of Gastrointestinal Illness (GI Illness) with a confirmed diagnosis of the same.
This list includes all voyages that have at least thirty ill people per thousand and has no upper limit as to the number of crew or passengers that are sick with a physician confirmed diagnosis of GI Illness. The Voyage Black Alert, or outbreak, may apply to passengers, crew, or both.
The Centers for Disease Control Vessel Sanitation Program states a GI Illness Outbreak to be either three-percent of passengers or crew. More specifically, there can be as many as 59 people per thousand (crew and passengers) before the voyage is reported to the general public.
Translating this to a newer cruise ship, there may be as many as 89 people sick on a cruise ship that holds 2000 passengers and 1000 crew members without the Vessel Sanitation Program, or the cruise lines, ever saying a word to anyone onboard that ship.
This method of reporting is limited as it only allows users to select ships in alphabetical order after the year is selected. Please use the Voyage Black Alert (Outbreak) tab in the left column to intelligently compare the health performances of cruise ship voyages to cruise line or cruise ports. Disease Strategies recommends avoiding ships that have had GI Illness Outbreaks (whether reported by the Vessel Sanitation Program or not); possibly avoiding the cruise lines (as they define the risk management protocols for their ships); and possibly the ports they visit depending on the results of your research.
Voyage Outbreaks by Ship Only
2008 GI Illness Outbreaks by Ship
2007 GI Illness Outbreaks by Ship
2006 GI Illness Outbreaks by Ship
2005 GI Illness Outbreaks by Ship
2004 GI Illness Outbreaks by Ship
2003 GI Illness Outbreaks by Ship
2002 GI Illness Outbreaks by Ship
2001 GI Illness Outbreaks by Ship
Target Audiences
Cruise ship medical and executive officers are the target audiences for this data. The strategy is to empower ship officers in controlling the spread of communicable GI Illness among crew and passengers in a proactive manner based on voyage history and retrospective disease analysis.
The statistics on this site are easily comprehended by a potential cruise passenger; but cruise ship medical officers and cruise line executives are urged to sudy the incidence of GI Illness on their cruise ships, cruise lines, and cruise ports and those of their competitors. The Vessel Sanitation Program has never released the bulk of the GI Illness information to the general public, but interpretation of the GI Illness data presented on this website can be extremely useful in increasing the effectiveness of the cruise industry risk management programs. Conversly, the public awareness of this data can divert potential passengers from cruise ships and cruise lines with a poor GI Illness Index to cruise ships with a better GI Illness Index.
Data Sources: CDC VSP GI Illness Data and Subsequent Data Analysis
The Centers for Disease Control, Vessel Sanitation Program, provides Disease Strategies with a periodic dump of the VSP Master Database containing the GI Illness reports from cruise ship medical officers since 2001. All GI Illness data on this website is self-reported to the Vessel Sanitation Program by the cruise ship medical staff or ship executive officers.
Disease Strategies acquires the data from the CDC VSP, cleans the dataset of obvious errors, corrects for data entry errors, and adds records that have been dropped over the last four years. The raw GI Illness data is placed into the Disease Strategies data warehouse, analyzed, interpreted, and presented on this website.
It should be noted that, Vessel Sanitation Program salaries and travel expenses are funded through cruise ship inspection and training fees through the Cruise Ship Industry, and not from the federal budget or the taxpayer. Surprisingly enough, because the CDC is not a regulatory agency, the Vessel Sanitation Program has no regulatory power so government employees of the CDC VSP can only make GI Illness risk management recommendations to the cruise lines and the final public health decisions are in the hands of the invidivual cruise lines.
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