Healthy Sailing: Prevention, Mitigation and Management of Infectious Disease on Cruise Ships and Passenger Ferries

COVID-19 revealed a need to address known, expected and emerging infections on large passenger ships. HEALTHY SAILING (Project Nr: 101069764) provides an integrated, methodological approach to address this need. The three-year project is establishing an evidence-base for mechanisms fa-cilitating infection spread onboard passenger ships and effectiveness of preven-tion, mitigation and management (PMM) measures. Foundational activities in the first year of implementation include systematic reviews, epidemiological studies, surveys and focus groups to identify risk factors, infection frequency, outbreak dynamics, and barriers to compliance with PMM measures. Mathematical mod-els are being developed to predict infection spread onboard and evaluate measures’ impact. Computational Fluid Dynamics modelling explores airborne respiratory pathogen dispersion in ventilated spaces of cruise environments. An Integrated Health E-surveillance System is under development to perform real-time syndromic, laboratory and environmental health surveillance onboard, and will feed an AI Intelligence Immune System to produce health threat alerts, char-acterize threat levels and recommend/monitor health measures. A toolkit moni-toring cleaning and disinfection is being prepared to improve effectiveness of current practices onboard, while a toolkit for technology-induced behavior change is underway, to improve hand hygiene practices onboard.