16 days ago
How clean are the public restrooms on cruise ships? Not clean at all, according to what's billed as the first scientific study of environmental hygiene in the industry.
A team of researchers from several Boston-area institutions report in the current issue of the medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases that they found "widespread poor compliance" with regular cleaning during unannounced inspections of dozens of cruise ship restrooms.
Moreover, the researchers found a link between the dirty restrooms on ships and subsequent outbreaks of norovirus -- a common gastrointestinal illness that has caused problems for the industry.
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The researchers -- from the Boston University School, Carney Hospital, Cambridge Health Alliance and Tufts University School of Medicine -- booked trained health care professionals onto ships to evaluated the thoroughness of disinfection, and they found that only 37% of 273 randomly selected restrooms that they evaluated were cleaned daily.
The study examines the cleanliness of six standardized objects in restrooms that have a high potential for fecal contamination: toilet seats, flush handles or buttons, toilet stall inner handholds, stall inner door handles, restroom inner door handles, and baby changing table surfaces. Although some objects in most restrooms were cleaned at least daily, on 275 occasions no objects in a restroom were cleaned for at least 24 hours, the study finds.
The researchers say that, overall, the toilet seat was the best-cleaned object in the restrooms. The least thoroughly cleaned object was the baby changing table. Nineteen objects in restrooms in 13 ships were not cleaned at all during the entire five-to-seven-day monitoring period.
The researchers found that one particularly troubling area for cleanliness in ship restrooms are the toilet area handholds, which were largely neglected. They accounted for more than half of the uncleaned objects on 11 ships.
The study does not disclose which ships from which lines were tested, but the researchers say the thoroughness of cleaning did not differ by line.
The findings, notably, did not correlate with Center for Disease Control and Prevention Vessel Sanitation Program inspection scores for the ships, the researchers say. They say the CDC, which inspects every cruise ship operating out of the United States for cleanliness, had given the ships tested an average score of 97 out 100.
The researchers note that near-perfect cleaning was documented on several vessels, proving that a high level of environmental hygiene is achievable.
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