90-Second Read: Poop Cruises Are No Laughing Matter

Only a few thousand cases of Hantavirus infection are reported each year in Europe, according to the World Health Organization's estimate. 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. 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. 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.

This dual role of the ship as both a spreader and a generator of disease was hotly debated amid the devastating cholera and yellow fever epidemics of the mid 19th century. The cruise ship crisis was eventually resolved, and on September 26, passengers were released. 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. 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?

Or, by contrast, one may see this as a demonstration of the World Health Organization providing a much-needed lifeline to health diplomacy. From there, it quickly spread across the globe, becoming a pandemic by 1900, causing between 12 and 15 million deaths. 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.

More recently, historian David Barnes has shown that cargo boats, in particular, were also seen as environments that fostered the self-generation of disease, implying that ships not only carry diseases but also produce and spread them to ports of call. It eventually reached the British colony of Hong Kong in 1894. In the summer of 1901, the French scientific society that published the journal "Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées" organized a cruise aboard the S.S.