Cruise Ship Annual Reports for GI Illness

The purpose of Cruising Healthy Annual Reports for Cruise Ships is to provide benchmarks on the overall performance of a cruise ship's ability to manage GI Illness over a one-year period. At the same time, readers can compare cruise ships against each other during the same calendar year to determine the ship's ability to maintain a low level of GI Illness over an entire year. Several factors that contribute to the effectiveness of a good risk management plan for GI Illness include: (1) the continuous monitoring of GI Illness metrics by the cruise ship and their operators, the cruise line, (2) knowing exactly when the executive staff should institute proactive cleaning procedures in public areas for passenger and crew, and (3) most importantly, the timeliness and thoroughness of their procedures.

The very nature of GI Illness on cruise ships requires pubic health investigators from the cruise line to look at not only the potential causes of GI related diseases, but also the incidence, distribution and control of these diseases in successive closed populations on each ship. It's a known fact that cruise ships differ greatly in their design which is one contributing factor in their ability to limit the spread of GI Illness, but the attitude and discipline of the entire staff across the ship is an even more important factor.

Because the Vessel Sanitation Program employees are so busy doing their jobs of bi-annual "in-dock" inspections, training, and new ship design reviews; very little of the VSP effort is dedicated to watching passenger and crew behaviors during a cruise, so it's up to the cruise lines to continually manage and implement their own plans on a moment's notice.