More than 100 Viking cruise passengers were hit with vomiting and diarrhea

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

There are more than 100 Viking cruise passengers were hit with bouts of vomiting and diarrhea amid a nasty norovirus outbreak onboard The Viking Neptune transformed into a cross-continental petri dish as more than 100 passengers onboard the cruise ship fell ill with the highly contagious norovirus this month.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 110 cruisers — more than 13% of the ship’s 838 passengers — were affected by the gastrointestinal virus during the vessel’s two-week trip from Iceland to New York, which ended Tuesday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already logged 13 outbreaks of norovirus on cruise ships in the first half of this year — the most since 2016, which saw the same number of outbreaks across 12 months.

9 crew members, or nearly two percent of the ship’s staff, also reported being ill during the voyage, which included stops in Greenland and Canada.

Viking Cruises told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that its crew on board the ship increased cleaning and disinfection procedures in response to the outbreak, and collected stool specimens from the sick to send to a CDC lab for pathogenic identification.

Vessel Sanitation Program officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention boarded the ship after it docked in New York and conducted an environmental health assessment, the agency said.

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