The norovirus broke out on the Cunard Line’s Queen Mary 2, leaving 224 cruise passengers and 17 crew sick with symptoms including diarrhea and vomiting.
The cruise left Southampton, United Kingdom, on March 8 on a transatlantic, roundtrip voyage that also visited New York and the Caribbean. The ship is at sea and is due back in Southampton on Sunday.
The outbreak was reported on March 18, according to a report Monday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The boat between New York City and Sint Maarten, a Caribbean country that is part of the Netherlands and shares an island with St. Martin.
The sick passengers accounted for 8.8% of the boat’s 2,538 customers, while the 17 cases among crew members represented 1.7% of the 1,232 workers.
In response to the outbreak, the crew upped their cleaning and disinfection procedures, isolated the sick, collected stool samples for testing, and worked with the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program, the agency said.
“Thanks to the swift response from our crew and the additional measures that we have in place, we are already seeing a reduction in reported cases,” the Cunard Line said Tuesday, according to The New York Times.
Including the Queen Mary 2 outbreak, 10 norovirus outbreaks have occurred on cruise ships that worked with the CDC program this year. There was also an E. coli outbreak and a presumed outbreak of ciguatera fish poisoning on two separate cruises in January.
