Shipboard medicine is no carnival

Without all the benefits of a land-based clinic, a virus outbreak on a cruise ship can overwhelm the ship's doctor and medical staff.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, amednews staff. March 3, 2003.

In the past months, several cruise ship voyages have been disrupted by outbreaks of norovirus, making passengers and crew miserable. Dr. Jabez Steenkamp is the ship's doctor on board the MS Carnival Conquest, which had three outbreaks in December 2002. His job was to contain the outbreak and keep the rest of the ship healthy.

Dr. Steenkamp has worked on cruise ships for 3 1/2 years. Dr. Steenkamp discussed with AMNews the challenges of practicing shipboard medicine.

Question: When did you realize you were in an outbreak situation?

Answer: We keep a very strict log of every guest and crew member that presents with gastrointestinal symptoms. Sailing from New Orleans in December, we had two guests with symptoms in the first 24 hours. That is normal. Twenty-four hours later, the count was 12. We knew that this was out of the ordinary, and we immediately started outbreak measures.

Q: Were you able to trace the cause of the outbreak?

A: We identified a guest whose symptoms started 36 hours before he boarded the ship. He was in the recovery phase when he came on board. It is possible that he "brought" the virus to the ship.

Q: What was it like when the rest of the ship realized there was an outbreak?

A: The majority of the guests and crew never got sick.

[...]

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