Cruise liners: stop the boats!By Robin Jamieson
Day after day desperate hungry people beholden to violent criminals are still risking and losing their lives boarding overloaded rubber dinghies with insufficient fuel, navigating the tides, currents and choppy seas of the busiest shipping route in the world. Anyone who has sailed between Calais and Dover knows that tides can turn, visibility can change fast and even with radar the three shipping lanes are just not safe.
In a humane and civilised society with advanced technology, there can be no reason why crossing in small boats is not stopped in a day, apart from support boats for cross-Channel swimmers. Are there no Ferries? Is there no Tunnel? Has air travel not been invented?
For people already within the Shengen zone to be allowed to seek asylum in the UK overcomes a pretend problem associated with the stupidity of Brexit, and allowing asylum seekers to work and pay tax stops the need for housing them in hotels, army camps and perhaps, eventually, concentration camps.
It would help if enough houses were being built for the needs of a growing population and if the advanced nations worked towards peace in the rest of the world, rather than enhancing arms exports and continual war.
The greater problem – cruise liners and their impact
The small boats are a smaller problem, easily solved, compared to a greater problem: a potential threat to the whole of humanity now studiously ignored, in the form of much bigger boats which are legal, profitable and advertised daily on all channels.
Cruise liners are, from a sailing perspective, simply hideous and aesthetically displeasing. They sit in tiny harbours with the engines pouring out black smoke, choking the local villages and harbour, releasing busloads of unfit tourists who appear to weigh twice as much as local people, who roll ashore and stay long enough to buy a cheap souvenir then on to the next port, hopefully looking forward to dinner at the Captain’s table.
Covid was a disaster for the cruise ships, but there has been no rational response. Cruise ships with Covid-infected aboard were floating Petri dishes, going from port to port and denied permission to land, while infections spread and people were dying at a time when we were being told that “masks are counterproductive”. And nobody mentioned the filters in the air conditioning system, and that it spread as an aerosol in a similar way to the common cold. Business is business, seemingly the highest of virtues.
Recent cases of Norovirus and Hantavirus
After Covid, it was known that another pandemic is possible as a result of jet travel which would enable a local virus to travel from airport to airport, city to city around the world. Now cruise ships are hit by Norovirus in the Caribbean, and by the less well known Hantavirus.
Early reports indicated that this virus, which is found in rodents, can spread to humans through faeces and urine but human to human transmission is limited. The shipping line quickly reported that they had no rats aboard, though mice were not mentioned. Some human to human transmission has been reported and an airline worker was infected.
Passengers will be repatriated into isolation and those seemingly free of infection will be required to isolate at home for 45 days, a safe precaution but it leaves unanswered a serious question, just as during the Covid pandemic. If the virus can travel easily from rodents to humans what about transmission form human to rodent?
If one of the former passengers in isolation is incubating the disease on land, what will stop it from spreading though the toilets to rodents in the sewers, which are said to outnumber the human population? That would then present a serious risk of spreading a virus more lethal than in the earlier pandemic.
The dangerous business model of the big tour operators
There are also questions to be asked about the business model of the tour companies who are taking large numbers of unhealthy people to remote parts of the world to see unusual birds and bats where they are likely, however briefly, to be exposed to unknown and isolated viruses, and to transport the virusus to other parts of the world where there is no immunity. The more exotic the location, the greater the risk, especially where bats are part of the ecosystem.
It is time now, as a matter of urgency, to stop the boats, the gigantic cruise liners, to ban advertising of cruises, the online booking, the use of port facilities and the building of boats that are not designed to limit the spread of infection.
The feature picture at the top of the article is of a cruise liner and is from Wikimedia Commons, here
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