It’s just your basic 24-hour stomach flu. It’s been going around (went through all 4 members of my household, one after the other). Highly contagious, and very unpleasant, but thankfully short-lived. After seeing how quickly and thoroughly it hit everyone in my house, it is not hard to see how it could go through an entire cruise ship in a matter of days.
“It’s just your basic 24-hour stomach flu. It’s been going around...”
There’s really no such thing as “stomach flu”. Influenza is not the culprit. What most people call “stomach flu” is really either bacterial food poisoning or most commonly food-borne infection from one of the noroviruses.
Either way, you’re probably looking at something that is transmitted via the fecal-oral route. Typically you’re dealing with food contamination as well.
There are a frighteningly large number of people out there who just dismiss their frequent bouts of gastroenteritis as “just the stomach flu”, when in reality they should be paying better attention to sanitary food prep (as well as good personal hygiene).
Cruise ships are a classic playground for norovirus infections because due to the common food prep areas once you get a little speck of infected fecal matter or vomit in the kitchen, then the everyone onboard the ship is going to be evacuating from both ends in short order and there won’t hardly be a surface left untouched.
It’s really a hardy little virus that can survive for weeks on a surface, infect a person with just a handful of individual viruses, and can even aerosolize from vomit or diarrhea.