Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease

Diseases

For most people in the UK their biggest medical worry is whether they will catch a particularly debilitating dose of the flu each winter.

Washing your hands and maintaining standard domestic and kitchen cleanliness will reduce the chance of picking up a UK winter virus. If you are infected, you’ll feel rough for a few days and then you will be back to normal, so the risks associated with becoming infected by most UK viruses are minimal.

Abroad, things are very different. Even just across the channel there are diseases that can easily kill. Tropical climates are particularly hazardous when discussing possible infections, but what are those infections?

To us, foreign diseases are just words you hear on the television news. We may vaguely recognise them as diseases but they aren’t of any concern to us, until we go abroad.

Researching foreign diseases can be worrying, but I want you to worry! I want you to worry just enough to tear down your complacency and see how serious a threat these diseases could be to you and your family. Abroad you risk infection with some really serious and highly contagious diseases. I want you to be motivated to take steps to avoid infection. The diseases you may find in many holiday destinations include:

• Dengue fever (mosquito bite)

• Hepatitis (contaminated food or drink)

• Cholera (contaminated food or water)

• AIDS/HIV (sexual contact or bodily fluid transfer)

• Diphtheria (contact with infected person)

• Yellow Fever (mosquito bite)

Travel Infectious Diseases | Travel Communicable Diseases

You don’t have to be a doctor to recognise most of them, but not knowing about them can lead to complacency. So the news says that Viral Hemorrhagic Fever’ has broken out at my destination. I never heard of it, so should I worry? It’s rare, isn’t it? Something they catch in dirty villages – nothing for me to worry about, right?

You should worry about it because that term covers a range ot similar conditions that you probably have heard of, including the more familiar Lassa fever. Marburg disease, and Rift Valley fever, and anyone can be infected.

At the same time the names ot other infectious diseases scare us, but they may no longer be a threat. Smallpox is a killer, isn’t it? Well it was. The World Health Organisation declared that smallpox has been eradicated.

But the plot thickens. The WHO now advises people not to take the smallpox vaccine. Apparently the minute risk of developing smallpox from the vaccination now presents a greater risk than not being vaccinated and risking contracting the disease (it it still exists).

Having warned you of the range of deadly tropical diseases that exist, I want to finally destroy any possible complacency that you may have about European diseases. Don’t assume that all the really bad diseases only exist in tropical climates. Here are just two examples of European diseases.