Occupational Health

The health risks a traveler is exposed to are varied and unique to each traveler. For example, a 28-year-old traveler going to Tanzania to hike Mount Kilimanjaro would have distinctly different health risks than a 28-year-old traveler going to Tanzania to go caving in the Amboni Caves, even if both travelers are healthy and without any medical issue.

A travel medicine consultation provides a comprehensive overview of health risks and how best to mitigate (decrease or prevent) those risks. Some health risks such as viruses and toxins can be mitigated with vaccines; others such as malaria and traveler's diarrhea can be mitigated with medications and avoidance behaviors such as using insect repellent.

However, traveler's face other health risks that can't be mitigated by vaccines and/or medications, e.g. schistosomiasis, chikungunya, trypanosomiasis, adventure sports. A comprehensive travel consultation provides the opportunity to determine those based on destination and planned trip activities and discusses how best to decrease them.

• Visiting friends and relatives (VFR) experience a higher incidence of travel-related infectious diseases, such as malaria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, hepatitis A and sexually transmitted diseases, than do other groups of international travelers.*
• In 2014, 67% of imported malaria cases in US civilians occurred among VFRs.*
• From 2008 through 2012 in the US, 85% of typhoid and 88% of paratyphoid cases occurred in VFRs.*

This makes VFRs one of the most important group of travelers to be seen for a travel consultation.

*Brunette GW, Nemhauser JB. CDC Yellow Book 2020: Health Information for International Travel. Oxford University Press; 2020.

The consultation usually begins with a review of your trip plans, medical history, medications you plan to travel with, allergies and vaccine history. After a brief physical, the provider will go over your travel medicine portfolio that has been created based on the travel questionnaire you completed. This typically starts with reviewing vaccine-preventable disease risks; then covers non-vaccine preventable disease risks and how to mitigate those risks. Next, the provider covers specifics about the destination country e.g. medical care, consular advice and contacts, etc. It ends with the provider answering any questions the traveler may have. Vaccines the traveler chooses to have may be given the same day or scheduled for an alternate day. Any prescriptions needed can be printed or submitted electronically.

In addition to disease risk, our travel medicine providers utilize several resources and databases providing real-time information about destination countries such as current disease outbreaks, crime, safety threats, consular advice and contact information, medical access information for ambulance and hospitals, transportation safety, etc. This is valuable information your primary care provider may not have access to. In addition, our clinic offers many hard-to-find travel vaccines to prevent yellow fever, typhoid, Japanese encephalitis, tickborne encephalitis and cholera. To receive these vaccines, you must see one of our travel medicine providers.