Emergency medical officials in Frankfurt declared a major incident on Thursday afternoon after up to 70 passengers on a flight from Mauritius suddenly fell ill mid-flight with vomiting and diarrhoea.
The mass-casualty incident unfolded on Condor flight DE2315 which departed Port Louis International Airport in Mauritius at around 7:55 am on Thursday and landed nearly 12 hours later in Germany at 5:30 pm.
Waiting for the Airbus A330 aircraft was a fleet of ambulances that had been dispatched after the airline alerted the local authorities of the mass outbreak of sickness onboard the plane.
Of the 290 passengers on flight DE2315, around a quarter of those onboard reported suffering gastrointestinal issues, including nausea and diarrhoea, although the airline says the pilots and flight attendants were not affected.
It’s not entirely clear how long into the flight that passengers started to report symptoms but even as more and more customers were struck down with some sort of tummy bug, a decision was made to press on to Frankfurt rather than landing in another country.
Thankfully, it appears that some of the passengers had already started to recover by the time the aircraft was in Frankfurt, as local media reported that not all of the ambulances were required in the end.
Suspicion as to the cause of the sickness has inevitably fallen on what the passengers ate during the flight, and Condor says it has already initiated an investigation into how so many passengers on a single flight became unwell.
A spokesperson for the carrier, however, refused to comment on whether onboard catering could have been the culprit.
Certain types of food poisoning, such as Staph food poisoning, can start to cause nasty symptoms like nausea, vomiting, stomach cramps, and diarrhoea in as little as 30 minutes after consuming contaminated food, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Other common and highly contagious tummy bugs, such as Norovirus, can take several days for symptoms to emerge, meaning that the passengers may have been infected during their stay in Mauritius.
Cleaners may well have had their work cut out to clean up the mess left onboard, as the brand-new aircraft hasn’t been scheduled to operate another flight for more than 24 hours after it landed in Frankfurt.
