Travel Abroad What Are the Health & Medical Risks ?

Travel & foreign travel. Whether you want to be a world wide traveler, a “trip guy”, fantasizing after watching the travel channel or even traveling worldwide for medical treatment a medical tourism vacationer one basic question always lurks in the back of the voyageurs mind. That is “Travel and traveling abroad – What are the risks?”

It can be said that overall that the chances of acquiring certain diseases or having an accident depends largely on where you travel and what you do while traveling itself. Out of the 45 millions of American , and of the 6 millions who travel each and every year abroad for medical procedures and tests many will go to what might be considered lesser developed countries where indeed the incident of tropical diseases is high. Numbers and estimates vary for totals yet the general guess by travel agents and travel insurance companies is that as a rough rule of thumb that of the 45 million general US travelers that alone 7 million American citizens travel to countries where the risk of malaria as a potentially devastating disease is fairly high. It seems that mosquitoes themselves are fairly ubiquitous in worldwide ecologies to spread the malaria clusters.

Working with your travel agent or agency to book your journey of a lifetime, or looking for last minute travel for that dream trip? What about medical and health concerns? How to minimize travel risks even if you purchase medical travel insurance that hopefully after all you wish to never user or utilize?

First of all your individual degree of risk can vary and be improved depending on good choices and your trip and vacation planning. Be thorough.

First of all plan and choose with care and carefully. First of all take into consideration the countries that you choose to visit and tour – some are basically more risky and a lot more disease ridden than others. Secondly consider the duration of your trip and the timing during the year to manipulate and integrate your choice with less risky time periods. Malaria as an example is less of an issue during drying non monsoon or typhoon time periods in tropical areas such as the Philippines. Or Central South Asia.

While or even before embarking you and your sight-seeing companions might consider the use (or sometimes non-use) of anti-malarial prophylactic drugs and as well as utilizing personal protection measures against insect bits. Of course routine vaccinations from your medical doctor, health care professional or medical clinic are recommended as a basic health care precautionary measure.

Travel broadens the mind – and in the cases of medical tourism may well afford you medical care and health care procedures that either is limited to you by cost or being at the back of the queue. It’s a matter of the benefits overall to yourself, family or friends of the medical tourism cluster available now in the era of international world travel and medtravel.

Lastly when traveling and away – even on the cheap – it never hurts to consider in total your personal risk taking behavior and behaviours as well as your own personal health status and that of your family and fellow passengers and trippers.

Pleasant travel and have a safe, entertaining and successful voyage.

Bonnie Rempel Hotels St. Boniface Hospital Winnipeg Medical Tourism Cluster  

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