More Cruise Ship Passengers Take Ill

Passengers on a third Florida-based cruise ship, Carnival Corp.’s Fascination, have come down with a virulent intestinal ailment, but public health officials said Monday that such outbreaks are not new and might actually be on the decline.

“To have three ships out at once in the same period of time is a little bit unusual, but we’ve heard of it before,” said Bill Toth, an epidemiologist with the Orange County, Fla., Health Department. Asked whether he would take a cruise himself, Toth replied, “Sure.”

After a three-day cruise to the Bahamas, the Fascination docked in Miami early Monday morning with 190 passengers and four crew members complaining of symptoms of gastrointestinal illness, Carnival said in a statement.

“I couldn’t wait to get my family off,” Valerie Cone told a Miami TV station as she left the port with her stricken son. Passengers reported suffering from vomiting and diarrhea.

It was not confirmed that the ailment was the Norwalk-like virus, which recently affected more than 1,000 passengers on ships belonging to Holland America Line and Disney Cruise Line, and led those companies to cancel cruises to clean and sterilize the vessels. But Carnival said it was treating the latest outbreak as another instance of the virus, the most common cause of nonbacterial gastrointestinal illness.

The 855-foot Fascination was supposed to set sail Monday afternoon on a four-day cruise to Key West and Cozumel, Mexico, but was delayed as special cleaning crews continued what the line called “comprehensive sanitizing efforts,” Carnival spokeswoman Jennifer de la Cruz said.

Dave Forney, chief of the vessel sanitation program at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said there was “nothing new” about a number of passengers on cruises becoming sick. In May to August, he said, probably as many people contracted the sickness while on cruises in Alaska.

“Norwalk is not a mystery disease; it’s not a new bug,” Forney said. “It’s a very common bug that causes problems in the United States all the time.”

He said his CDC co-workers are trying to get historical records on outbreaks of gastrointestinal diseases on the 140 cruise ships that call at U.S. ports, and said he suspects the number of people falling ill has likely decreased over the years.

“We keep wondering here at CDC why this has generated so much interest for such a long period of time,” Forney said of media coverage of the episodes.

The Norwalk-like ailment has been reported in other confined places frequented by the public, from hotels to a Boy Scout camp. But Dr. Frederick Southwick, chief of infectious diseases at the University of Florida’s College of Medicine, said buffet food lines and swimming pools on cruise vessels might give the virus very effective transmission routes.

“The virus is hardy, it can withstand heat, concentrations of chlorine and some drying,” he said. “The good thing is that this is not a dangerous virus, and doesn’t cause serious morbidity or mortality.”

De la Cruz, the Carnival spokeswoman, said the recent occurrences of the virus hadn’t had a discernable impact on reservations for the Miami-based line, which operates 18 ships. Passengers scheduled to board the Fascination on Monday afternoon were given a two-page letter explaining what had happened and offering such options as rescheduling their holiday or canceling with a full refund, she said. After a cleaning, the ship departed in the evening.

“Out of 1,026 cabins, only 45 canceled,” De la Cruz said. “I think if there was a lot of fear now as regards the cruise industry, we would have had a whole lot of people take us up on that option.”

However, the repeated instances of the virus may be spreading concern in the general public. One South Florida TV station found in a poll that 59% of people responding were now worried they might get sick if they took a cruise.