Every year, millions of people travel abroad, exposing themselves to various diseases. Advice on risk avoidance and on self-medication is not always successful; sometimes travellers return home ill or become unwell soon afterwards. There are many possible causes for such illnesses, and physicians should try to establish whether the disease is specifically associated with the recent journey. The...

Before setting off on a holiday, particularly of the adventurous kind, it is vital to obtain appropriate medical advice to ensure a safe trip. However there are concerns that this need is not being adequately met. In this comment, Irmgard Bauer from James Cook University, Australia, discusses where travel medicine is failing and what can be done about it, in the context of her recent observatio...

BACKGROUND In 1996, the Dutch National Coordination Center for Travelers' Health Advice (LCR) was established to improve uniformity in health advice to travelers and in the quality of national vaccination centers. In this study, we evaluate the influence of LCR guidelines on the quality of travel clinics in the Netherlands. METHODS In 1997 and 2001, questionnaires regarding implementation of ...

An external elective period is included in the curriculum of most medical schools in the United Kingdom. Of this year’s applicants for elective grants at one school, 97% planned to go abroad; 69% of applicants chose developing countries, the most popular destination being southern Africa. Attention has been drawn to the potential health risks facing elective students (J H Cossar et al, fifth in...

INTRODUCTION There is an increasing number of people who travel around the world. Every traveler is exposed to nearly all infectious risks which may occur during his travel time. Some of the main risk factors can be water quality, temperature and high humidity and the exposure to multi-resistant microorganisms. To tackle the upcoming problem there is an imperative need to develop a new branch o...

BACKGROUND Patients with complex medical comorbidities travel for protracted periods to remote destinations, often with limited access to medical care. Few descriptions are available of their preexisting health burden. This study aimed to characterize preexisting medical conditions and medications of travelers seeking pre-travel health advice at a specialized travel medicine clinic. METHODS R...

Wilderness medicine courses tend to teach similar topics, but they can differ with respect to philosophy, teaching methods, and financing. Our not-for-profit course is academically based and is similar to other programs with regard to presentations of didactic material and outdoor training, but there are also important differences in teaching methodology that are not used by other programs to d...

An increasing number of immunocompromised individuals are pursuing international travel, and a better understanding of their international travel patterns and pretravel health care is needed. We evaluated the clinical features, itineraries, and pretravel health care of 486 immunocompromised international travelers seen at Global TravEpiNet sites from January 2009 to June 2012. We used bivariate...

Few data regarding the use of Japanese encephalitis (JE) vaccine in clinical practice are available. We identified 711 travelers at higher risk and 7,578 travelers at lower risk for JE who were seen at US Global TravEpiNet sites from September of 2009 to August of 2012. Higher-risk travelers were younger than lower-risk travelers (median age = 29 years versus 40 years, P < 0.001). Over 70% of h...

Introduction: Nowadays the trend to travel abroad has extremely grown. This is while, paying attention to travelers’ health is an incredibly important issue. Many organizations try their best to provide health services during travelers’ trips. Meanwhile, the biggest and most effecting health care providers all around the world are hospitals. Regarding this fact, a theory has be...