My Travel Medicine Journey

This week we are covering pretravel advise for travelers going to armed conflict zones.  This is not recommended but if someone must go, in addition to regular pretravel suggestions, this is the advice from the US Department of State: “In our country Travel Advisories, we advise you to not travel to high-risk countries or areas due to local conditions and/or our limited ability to provide consular services in those places.  You should strongly consider not going to them at all….

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Today I’m going to cover traveling for business.  Section 06 is mostly concerned with the pretravel assessment but there are during and post travel considerations as well.  According to the CDC Yellow Book business travel is projected to grow and although this was written pre-covid it may still be true in spite of the amount of online communications that are now occurring.  The Yellow Book differentiates between small/midsize companies and large ones with the expectation that the large companies are…

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Today we’ll get back to the outline.  02. IMMUNOLOGY/VACCINOLOGY Types of Vaccines/Immunizations/Immunobiologics 04. Cholera Summary 4 Summary of cholera vaccines Vaccine name(Manufacturer) How given Number of doses recommended Age range How long vaccination is effective Available in the US? Vaxchora(Emergent BioSolutions) By mouth 1 dose 2–64 years At least 3–6 months Not currently* Dukoral(SBL Vaccines) By mouth 2 doses, given 1–6 weeks apart (Children aged 2–5 years need 3 doses, given 1 to 6 weeks apart) 2 years and older…

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I think I’ll take a break this week from the outline and share some pieces of information that I acquired while working that helped me with the exam. 

05. OTHER CLINICAL CONDITIONS ASSOCIATED WITH TRAVEL (10%)          01. Barotrauma Symptoms: Prevention: Treatment: Two points on this topic: I will never forget shortly after I graduated from residency I had a new mother bring her baby in for a routine well child check.  We discussed that she was going to be travelling with the baby and I gave some general pediatrician advice about the vaccinations.  When she asked if I had any other specific travel advice I remember blank panic as…

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Moving on to the next category we’ll start looking at diseases.  04. DISEASES CONTRACTED DURING TRAVEL (12%)          Diseases Associated with Vectors          01. African Tick Bite Fever 1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). African tick bite fever. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/diseases/african-tick-bite-fever 2. Silva-Ramos, C. R., & Faccini-Martínez, Á. A. (2021, September 10). Clinical, epidemiological, and laboratory features of rickettsia africae infection, African tick-bite fever: A systematic review. Le infezioni in medicina. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8805502/

Today I decided to cover a section from the next category that is very different from the vaccine section that was covered last week.  03. PRETRAVEL ASSESSMENT/CONSULTATION (35%) 05. Athletes I wasn’t able to find a comprehensive discussion anywhere about pretravel consideration for athletes; however, the CDC Yellow book has an excellent section about adventure travel in Chapter 9.  Most of what I found available online was discussing preparations and treatments for jet lag and travel fatigue to help athletes…

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I feel like it gets a little daunting and is tedious to go through some of the sections in order so I decided to jump from section to section, covering what I felt like were the higher yield sections and mixing up the categories so that the information didn’t start to blur in my memory.  Having a solid understanding of travel medicine diseases, treatments, preventive measures and vaccines seemed the most relevant.  So, today I’m covering the next section under…

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The next section in the Body of Knowledge is 01. EPIDEMIOLOGY (10%)02. Geographic specificity/global distribution of diseases and potential health hazards This is a very general topic and too much to cover all at one time; however, further down is a review of diseases and health hazards so this information gets broken down later into manageable chunks. I decided to move on to the next section which is the basics of vaccines.  The topics specifically mentioned are live vaccines, inactivated…

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I had wanted to get this started up last year but was too busy between school and work so this year I’d like to start by covering some of the topics that appear in the Body of Knowledge for the Practice of Travel Medicine – revised 2017.  Reviewing the material that I compiled is what helped me to pass the Certificate in Travel HealthTM exam.  Additionally, I attended the review course, which I found extremely helpful.  I also had some…

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