NEW ORLEANS (AP) – A nasty stomach bug hit 120 passengers and crew members during a Mexican cruise scheduled to end Thursday at New Orleans.
Passengers began showing up in the Holiday’s infirmary two days into its five-day cruise. By Wednesday, 79 of its 1,670 passengers and 41 of its 660 crew members had become ill, a Carnival Cruise Line spokesman said.
“The ship’s crew is conducting aggressive cleaning and sanitizing … to prevent further spread,” Jennifer de la Cruz said.
Dave Forney of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had said earlier Wednesday that 5 percent of the passengers and 2 percent of its crew were ill. De la Cruz’ figures worked out to 6 percent of the crew and nearly 5 percent of the passengers.
Ships must tell the CDC if 2 percent of passengers or crew have gastrointestinal symptoms, and 3 percent is the statistical definition of an outbreak, Forney said.
Forney, chief of the CDC’s vessel sanitation program, spoke at a New York seminar sponsored by the cruise industry. His topic was noroviruses – a very common, easily transmitted family of viruses which cause sudden nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.
They cause an estimated 23 million illnesses a year, lasting up to 48 hours.
Outbreaks have been documented in hospitals and nursing homes in Vancouver, Wash., New Hampshire and New York.
So far in 2002, Forney said, there have been 23 outbreaks of GI illness aboard 19 ships. Eleven were confirmed norovirus.
It has been nearly a year since the last outbreak on a cruise ship with New Orleans as its home port. In December, 229 passengers on Carnival’s largest ship – about 7 percent of the total – and 30 of its crew members became ill.
The Holiday returns Thursday mornings from a cruise to Playa Del Carmen and Cozumel, Mexico, and embarks that afternoon on a four-day trip to Mexico.
About 1,500 people are booked on that trip, which will leave on time, de la Cruz said.
“We have well-established rigorous cleaning and sanitizing protocols for a turnaround day, for that period between when one cruise ends and another one starts. We’ll be putting that into place tomorrow, and sending senior supervisors from Miami to oversee it,” she said.
The Holiday will be replaced next October with the 2,052-passenger Sensation.
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AP writer Beth Harpaz contributed to this report from New York.
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On the Net:
http://www.cdc.gov
http://www.carnival.com
AP-ES-10-15-03 1829EDT
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