Air on board cruise ships ’is twice as bad as at Piccadilly Circus’ | Travel | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2017/jul/03/air-on-board-cruise-ships-is-twice-as-bad-as-at-piccadilly-circus
Breath of fresh air? Passengers on the sundeck of P&O’s Oceana.
Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy
Passengers on cruise ships could be exposing themselves to dangerous levels of pollution, according to an investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches team that found some public areas on the ships’ decks were more polluted than the world’s worst-affected cities.
The undercover investigation, which will be broadcast tonight at 8pm, focused on the levels of “ultra-fine particles” found in the air on and around cruise ships, from the fuel the ships’ engines burn. These particles are so small – around a thousandth of the width of a human hair – that they can enter the bloodstream via the lungs.
More than 1.9 million people from the UK travel on a cruise each year and there is growing concern among the scientific community about the health risks.
Dispatches used a P-Trak ultrafine particle counter to measure the ultra-fine particulates suspended in the air on board P&O Cruises’ ship Oceana. The Oceana is more than 250 metres long, 15 storeys high and can carry more than 2,000 passengers.
The device found 84,000 ultra-fine particulates per cubic centimetre on the deck downwind of, and directly next to, the Oceana’s funnels. That’s more than double the amount found at London’s Piccadilly Circus, where the number of ultra-fine particulates per cubic centimetre was 38,400.