Cruise Ships and GI Illness Risk Management
Almost 80% of all cruise ship voyages that dock at U.S. ports have at least one passenger or crewmember with a confirmed diagnosis of gastrointestinal illness by the ship's medical staff. Several forms of GI Illness including Norovirus are highly contagious and may cause severe diarrhea, headaches and, at times, projectile vomiting. Over the last 8-years, over 147,000 passengers and crew have been diagnosed with some form of gastrointestinal illness.
Knowing that GI Illness is present in 4 of 5 voyages; quick disease recognition coupled with swift execution of the ship’s GI Illness risk management plan are two crucial factors. Correctly timed, there should be minimal impact on crew and passenger disease incidence rates. However, if either factor is handled incorrectly, it can mean the difference between just a few persons with GI Illness or hundreds over a three or four-day period and increased incidence on subsequent cruises.
Cruising Healthy GI Illness Analysis Tools
Cruising Healthy Voyage Alerts use retrospective voyage information obtained from the Vessel Sanitation Program. GI Illness Voyage Alerts are specific to a cruise ship, cruise line, or cruise port and are issued in Green, Yellow, Orange, Red and Black for increasing GI Illness levels. Voyage Alerts are an invaluable research tool for the Ship Medical Officer and Executive Staff.
Cruising Healthy Annual Reports provide annual summary information about cruise ships, cruise lines, and cruise ports across one-year calendar periods. Cruising Healthy Annual Reports, like Voyage Alerts, use a color-coded system including Green, Yellow, Orange and Red. These Reports are an invaluable tool for determining a baseline incidence rates across one-year periods for a given cruise ship, cruise line, or cruise port.
Since 2004, Disease Strategies has been ranking the overall GI health of cruise ships, cruise lines and cruise ports based on Gastrointestinal (GI) Illness rates provided by the CDC. And, for the first time, Disease Strategies has released Cumulative GI Illness data on cruise ships, cruise lines and cruise ports over an eight-year period for professional and public consumption.
This website contains approximately 50,000 pages of detailed information relating to GI Illness incidence on every voyage since 2001—including over 200 cruise outbreaks reported on the CDC VSP website. This website contains the largest Cruise Ship GI Illness and Norovirus data set ever published for professional and public use.
Vessel Sanitation Program GI Illness Definition (2005): "Reportable gastrointestinal illness case – means a case of gastrointestinal illness with one of the following characteristics: (1) diarrhea (three or more episodes of loose stool in s 24 hour period); or (2) vomiting and one additional symptom including one or more episodes of loose stool in a 24 hour period, or abdominal cramps, or headache, or muscle aches, or fever; and (3) reported to the master of the vessel, the medical staff or other designated staff by passenger of crew member.
NOTE: For an outbreak to become public, at least 3% of the passengers OR crew must be ill with all three symptoms. The table below provides cruise ship outbreaks for 2008 in alphabetical order. For more complete information, please see the various links to the left of this page.
