90-Second Read: Pleasure, Plague, and Panic: Why Cruise Ship Outbreaks Still Haunt Us

Only a few thousand cases of Hantavirus infection are reported each year in Europe, according to the World Health Organization's estimate. Some may argue that this is an aftereffect of the COVID-19 pandemic and the symbolic, if not epidemiologically significant, role that cruise ship outbreaks played in it. Before this event, the metaphor of cruise ships as "floating petri dishes" had been used to describe gastrointestinal outbreaks on board, without indicating them as a risk to off-board public health. Sénégal to Hantavirus on the MV Hondius, contagions at sea carry symbolic force far beyond their case counts.

Still, the question remains: Why do cruise ship epidemics, from the Diamond Princess to the MV Hondius, attract social and political commentary in a manner so disproportionate to their epidemiological significance? If a celebrated vessel like the Sénégal could still carry plague-transmitting rats, then no ship was safe. The cruise ship crisis was eventually resolved, and on September 26, passengers were released. Ships had been indicted for introducing epidemics to new locations since Thucydides, the Greek historian, obliquely hinted at a naval introduction of the "plague of Athens" during the Peloponnesian War.

Thus, the Hantavirus, from its humble abode among rodents, has suddenly found itself caught in the limelight between scientific concern, media sensationalism, and global health melancholia. The plague's global spread from 1899 onwards, however, forced them to refocus. By 1903, scientists became convinced that, as far as the maritime spread of plague was concerned, rats should be singled out as the key culprits. And there was one naval epidemic in particular that solidified the belief that rats spread plague both between ports and within boats.

The Third Plague Pandemic, triggered by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, had its roots among wild rodents in Yunnan, a southwestern province of China. In the summer of 1901, the French scientific society that published the journal " Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées " organized a cruise abo ard the S.S. With over 700 passengers becoming infected in the early period of the pandemic, the cruise ship was quarantined in Japan for roughly a month as the whole world watched.