Until we’re told otherwise, we’re going to eliminate the word “norovirus” from our vocabulary. This move should not be taken lightly when you have a vocabulary as limited as ours. However, what’s one less word, even if there are others that should probably go first?
But norovirus is gone…or going.
Since you probably know something about cruising, it’s probably in yours. Whenever there is a norovirus alert, everybody from medical staff on the ship to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) goes into action. Picture the horns sounding and the lights flashing. Thankfully, it stops short of “Abandon Ship!”…at least until the CDC is on the scene.
Earlier this month, the alert was sounded on the Coral Princess as it sailed — with 66 passengers and three crew members “exhibiting signs of sickness” — into Fort Lauderdale, where it was met by the CDC. As a result, Princess increased cleaning and disinfecting its ship, made announcements to encourage passenger case reporting, prepare a ship-turnaround disinfection plan and make daily medical reports to the CDC.
Now, we don’t mean to make light because people became ill on a cruise ship. It happens. Nor do we minimize the importance of taking precautions. Put a few thousand people in these kind of close quarters, and if somebody’s contagious it’s likely to spread. It’s not the procedures, the reporting, the cleaning and the disinfecting that we find amusing. It’s not fun being sick, on a cruise ship or anywhere else.
It’s just the word. Norovirus has been called “a ribonucleic acid that causes approximately 90% of epidemic non-bacterial outbreaks of gastroenteritis around the world.”
Doctors we’ve talked to on cruise ships call it something else…GI, or gastrointestinal illness.
We call it the ‘flu.