Mountain climbing in Nepal. Scuba diving in Honduras. Gorilla watching in Rwanda. If you don’t travel, you’re reading only one page in the book of life.
But if you do travel, you’re at risk for diseases virtually unheard of in the good old United States. “Of the 20 million Americans who leave the country each year, 2 million to 3 million go into what we call the Third World,” says Dr. Steven Mostow of the University of Colorado. “And the incidence of disease is very high in that group of countries.”
Examples include cholera, malaria, and dengue fever. Tuberculosis, too, is on the rise worldwide (in the United States, too, in this case). And remember, while AIDS seems to have stabilized in the United States, cases are soaring worldwide. Plus, in some places- Africa, for example-it’s much more prevalent among heterosexuals, so the high-risk sexual preferences are flip-flopped.
Even what seems like child’s play here is deadly in some parts of the world. “In some Third World environments, measles is still a wild, uncontrolled disease,” Dr. Mostow says. “And chickenpox is probably the most contagious virus in the world.”
Furthermore, Dr. Mostow points out, a lot of adventurous travelers aren’t exactly a 3 dollars cab fare away from first-rate treatment. “Papua New Guinea, for example, has some of the best diving in the world,” he says. “But if you contract measles there, you’re in deep doo-doo. The medical care is as primitive as the rest of the island.”
There’s a name for all this: emporiatrics, the study of the diseases of the emerging world. And there’s a way to deal with it as well: travel medicine clinics that specialize in getting you there and back disease-free.
“If you visit a travel clinic before you travel, your chances of getting ill are greatly reduced,” says Dr. Mostow, who set up one such clinic, Rose Travel Medicine, in Denver. “You get all the right shots and information on the food-borne diseases and sexually transmitted diseases. We also go through how you deal with a consulate if you’re in trouble and give you a list of competent doctors who speak English.”
Remember, that visa-required shots are to protect the country you’re going to from you, not the other way around. That’s one reason that travel clinics make sense if your itinerary includes places more exotic than the grand tour of Europe.
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