Water Management Practices for Ships

Improperly managed water is an established route for infectious disease transmission on ships. The importance of water was illustrated in the review of more than 100 outbreaks associated with ships undertaken by Rooney et al. (2004), in which one fifth were attributed to a waterborne route. This is probably an underestimate, as more than one third of the 100 reviewed outbreaks could not be associated with any specific exposure route, so some may have been waterborne.