A surprise health inspection catches one of Royal Caribbean’s vessels slipping badly on hygiene.
Okay, this is just scary.
Our friends over at Cruise Critic are reporting that inspectors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently hit Royal Caribbean’s Monarch of the Seas for one of its two annual surprise health inspections.
To earn a passing grade, your ship has to score 86 points out of 100.
Monarch came in at 85. Not good. And we’re not talking a handful of violations, either, but dozens of them. Really not good. But what jumps out at you are the nature of the violations the CDC found.
Among other things:
- Dirty dishes stacked amid clean ones
- Multiple examples of unsafe food handling
- Missing safety signs
- Poor management of pool water
- Multiple encounters of fruit flies among the food
Definitely not good.
To give you an idea how serious this is, there’s only one other cruise ship that’s flunked a CDC inspection all year. That was the fairly new — and very pricey — Queen Mary 2.
You can read the entire Cruise Critic report here.
CDC health inspections are tough. They should be. Of the dozens of liners making calls on American ports, only eight this year have aced the inspections with perfect scores.
But hearing that ships can actually fail these tests is more than a little disconcerting, because once on board, we have little control over our own health and safety. We depend on crew and company to keep things ship-shape.
They place the well-being of thousands in jeopardy every time they don’t.
So with this failed inspection, does this mean that Monarch of the Seas will now have to be re-christened as “Monarch of Disease?” Hardly. Royal Caribbean will get these things fixed and the ship will be just fine.
That’s why these inspections are done, to show crews and companies where they’re slipping so they can better protect us.
Still, it’s a reminder of why government oversight is important when it comes to public health.
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I’ve only been on one Royal Caribbean cruise and I had a good experience;however, I’ve talked with several other people who had horrible experiences when it comes to improper food handling, resulting in sickness. When I went on a Carnival cruise, I vowed to NEVER go again- I had a brief stomach virus AND I ended up suffering with strep throat right after the cruise.