A recent Cunard Line’s Queen Victoria voyage ending Friday saw 74 passengers and crew come down with bouts of diarrhea by an unknown etiology.
The voyage that started Feb, 21, returned to Ft. Lauderdale, FL Friday where a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Vessel Sanitation Program (VSP) environmental health officer and an epidemiologist boarded the ship to conduct an environmental health assessment and evaluate the outbreak and response activities.
In response to the outbreak, Cunard Line and the crew aboard the ship reported the following actions: Increasing cleaning and disinfection procedures according to their outbreak prevention and response plan, collecting stool specimens from passenger and crew gastrointestinal illness cases for testing and making twice-daily reports of gastrointestinal illness cases to VSP.
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