More than 300 people aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 cruise ship have contracted a highly infectious stomach bug.
Health officials at San Francisco, where the liner is currently docked, said that 276 passengers and 28 crew were affected by the norovrius, which causes both vomiting and diarrhoea.
But the US centres for disease control and prevention said that only a handful of people were still suffering from the virus, which is thought to have broken out when passengers from New York joined the cruise on January 8th.
Staff aboard the Cunard-owned cruise ship, which departed Southampton 23 days ago, were praised for containing the virus via increased cleaning and disinfection measures.
In all about a fifth of the ship's 1,652 passengers were hit by the outbreak; a term only applied by US officials when more than three per cent of any given population is affected.
The QE2, currently on a four-month round the world cruise, will next call at Hawaii.
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