Troy Media – By Sid Kaplan, Travel Writer
Travelers should stay informed about disease outbreaks just as they do about political unrest or major weather problems at their destination. Consult with a travel medicine doctor, read government alerts and then, just as with any travel plans, decide on your own comfort level and evaluate the risks for yourself.
Whenever word of an outbreak of influenza or some other disease hits the airwaves, there will be plenty of news going around about worst-case-scenarios. TV newscasts will show you over and over again the few people who are suffering. They will show hospitals stockpiling medications and schools and restaurants closing.
With all that suffering, and with the disease spreading, should you still travel? Should you even leave your house?
Stop and think for a moment: Did the newscasts mention that those schools and restaurants are closed as a precaution, not because everyone there was sick?
I don’t want to make light of any disease outbreak. The first thing travelers need to do is to remain calm and stay informed. Each outbreak is serious, and each one has caused deaths for a few. But each outbreak needs to be evaluated by where you are going and what you will be doing. We don’t think you should necessarily panic and cancel a trip.
You’ve read the headlines stating that the World Health Organization (WHO) has raised the health alert status to Level 5. Sounds terrible, doesn’t it?
But all that means is that human-to-human contact has occurred in more than one country. That happens every year with the ordinary flu.
Even if the WHO raised the alert to Level 6, what happens? Even though the headlines may read something like “WHO fears pandemic,” it pays to stop and consider what that really means. What it tells you is that human-to-human contact has occurred in more than one global region . . . more than one continent. It does not mean everyone is getting it.
Even when a “state of emergency” is declared somewhere, it does not mean the whole country is sick. Nations declare a state of emergency when they need to get access to money and other resources to respond to what is happening, so they can move more quickly to stop the disease outbreak.
In the past, some of the diseases making headlines were Bird Flu, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), and HIV-AIDS. Currently it is H1N1. But most travelers were, and are, not affected.
We went to Southeast Asia during the Bird Flu outbreak. We did consult with our travel medicine doctor. He made sure our yearly influenza vaccinations were up-to-date, and gave us a prescription for Tamiflu.
He told us to wash our hands often, to use a hand sanitizer when we couldn’t, and to exercise caution and good hygiene as always. We did go to visit a farm in Cambodia, but since we didn’t go snuffling bird feathers, we felt we were OK.
I know that might sound a little facetious, but what we want to emphasize is that there is no need to panic. We believe that travel is good for you and for a healthy global economy.
We’ll say it one more time, we’re not medical experts, but we think you can still travel if you stay informed and exercise proper caution. In the most extreme case, you might have to change your itinerary, but we believe you can still have a great trip.
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