MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Clean bill of health to be required from cruise ships.

CRUISE ships visiting the Falkland Islands are to be asked to produce a certificate of health before putting passengers ashore, in a bid to protect the local population from infectious diseases.

Chief Medical Officer, Dr Roger Diggle, told MercoPress the decision was made in the wake of a recent cruise ship visit when some passengers were suffering from a stomach bug ? possibly the Norwark virus: "In January, a cruise ship reported voluntarily that they had an illness on board but there were issues raised in the South American press as to whether or not similar cruise ships had reported illnesses or not.

"To me it seems if the cruise ship's going to deliberately conceal something there's nothing we can do about that but if they have to make a statutory declaration that they are fit, it puts the onus of responsibility back onto the cruise ship." He added that subsequent illnesses in the Islands could have been passed on by passengers from that ship: "There certainly was a whole spate of people getting an illness which could have been Norwalk but it may have come from there or it may have come from other sources."

Blank copies of the Maritime Certificate of Health are already carried by vessels, which can complete them when required to make their own statutory declaration to ports that their passengers are not carrying any contagious diseases.

Dr Diggle described instances where the new powers might be used: "It would have to be where the illness on board the ship was sufficiently serious to pose a major threat to the health of the Islands. One could envisage a situation where it was a relatively minor illness but 50 to 60 per cent of the passengers and crew have got some illness like the flu - you wouldn't particularly want everybody in Stanley to be exposed to that. The chances of it being a really serious, life-threatening infection are pretty remote when you think how long the passengers have had to travel to get on board and then to get here."

Internationally, he said, air travel posed the biggest danger to public health, but there was a limit to what could be done to prevent the transmission of illness by plane passengers.

On planes, he said: "The number of passengers is smaller but it's the immediacy of the travel that's an issue. You could have somebody who's actually incubating something and so it's difficult to say how you'd deal with that. If somebody doesn't know they're ill and they get off the plane there's not much you can do. But when you think about the number of passengers we have coming through here compared with an airport like Heathrow, the risks are much, much smaller. What's different about ships is the large number of people who are all cooped up together for a long period of time so you are more likely to get a mini epidemic."

Falklands health experts are not yet moving to import anti-viral drugs for a potential bird flu epidemic. Dr Diggle said: "We are not doing anything but wait and see, for the simple reason that we can only get it transmitted in here by people coming from places that have got it. We would get our drug supply from the UK if we needed it: If it looked as if it was spreading across Europe or South America we'd have to order in stocks of drugs, and then talk about restricting travel. The amount of drugs that we'd need compared to the UK is trivial so we'd be able to order that and get it on the next plane. We'd be in a position to limit the spread of it to an extent."

Sue Gyford (MP) Stanley