It’s only news, when it’s on a cruise.

And so it goes again, I’m unable to avoid reports of a breaking news story so important it had to be aired immediately and without hesitation, a story so earth shatteringly mind blowing ABC News and NBC News both carried the story in the USA, a story so relevant and unmissable that the Daily Telegraph and Sky News ran it in the UK.

What is it I hear you cry? What can possibly generate this much media interest? Is the Queen actually a man? Are the Cheeky Girls really forming a new coalition and running for Government? No, it’s much much worse….

Some people got ill while on holiday.

The recent Royal Caribbean Explorer of the Seas cruise had to be cut short due to illness on board attributed to the now infamous Norovirus.

I just wonder why it’s such big news when Cruise lines are involved.

A little about the virus. There are at least 25 different strains of noroviruses and it’s the most common cause of stomach bugs in the UK. Each year, it’s estimated that up to 1 million people in the UK catch norovirus and on average there 20 million cases of acute gastroenteritis caused by noroviruses in the United States (that means about 1 in every 15 Americans will get a norovirus related illness each year).

That’s just the figures from two countries, you can only imagine how widespread this is on a global scale.

So why is it only on cruise ships do the masses start revolting and looking for someone directly to blame, why only on cruise ships do people start demanding compensation for what is basically a tummy bug. And who on earth will these people demand compensation from next time they get the flu?

I appreciate it’s not a pleasant situation to find yourself in, being ill, but I get the impression it’s almost as if people believe Cruise lines deliberately take no precaution to stop this happening.

Quite the opposite in fact, the Cruise lines take this issue extremely seriously, if only because of the high costs of taking a ship out of service or cutting a cruise short. Not to mention the subsequent (massive amounts of) adverse publicity an outbreak generates.

I’ve read comments from people who say they would never entertain the idea of going on a cruise for fear of catching something terrible. While it’s true cruise ships are relatively small, densely populated areas where rapid transmission can occur, so are football matches, concert venues and supermarkets, somehow I don’t see the same people writing to Mr Tesco demanding compensation for catching a bug off a random stranger in the sauces and pickles aisle.

I am of the opinion that some of the over exaggerated, sensationalist headlines which depict cruise ships as festering dens of disease are partly to blame for this growing culture of ‘complain and compensate’.

Besides how many outbreaks last year could you mention specifically? – two or three perhaps?  How many passengers were affected last year by this virus on board? – a few hundred perhaps?

Quite frankly when you consider that 20,986 000 cruise passengers were carried in 2013 by over 50 different cruise lines worldwide I fail to see why a few hundred cases of sickness and diarrhea even makes the news in the first place.

Do you?