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Travel Forum / Destinations / Africa / May 2005Got a question about travel clinics and shots to be taken before going to Tanzania
Is anyone here familiar with what are the neccessary things to be immunized against before going on a trip to Tanzania? The travel clinics here in Canada charge ridiculous amounts and I think i most prob need immunization against HepA - not sure about yellow fever, etc. Any help would be greatly appreciated. > Is anyone here familiar with what are the neccessary things to be immunized > against before going on a trip to Tanzania? The travel clinics here in > Canada charge ridiculous amounts and I think i most prob need immunization > against HepA - not sure about yellow fever, etc. Any help would be greatly > appreciated. This kind of information can be found at http://travel.state.gov > > Is anyone here familiar with what are the neccessary things to be immunized > > against before going on a trip to Tanzania? The travel clinics here in [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > > This kind of information can be found at http://travel.state.gov CDC.gov would be even better >Is anyone here familiar with what are the neccessary things to be immunized >against before going on a trip to Tanzania? The travel clinics here in >Canada charge ridiculous amounts and I think i most prob need immunization >against HepA - not sure about yellow fever, etc. Any help would be greatly >appreciated. Unfortunately I don't have the topical information for Tanzania, but the neighboring Kenya requires no immunization at all, except if you enter from a neighboring country where certain diseases are prevalent. (I'm not perfectly certain about the current rules. Please chime in, anyone, with fresh information.) For a short, typical tourist trip you may, in fact, not need any inoculation, particularly if you are careful and don't expose yourself. That said, most useful are probably inoculations against hepatitis A and B and tetanus, which will also be of some use back home. By far the most dangerous health risk is malaria. You must do something against it, and I recommend to take prophylactic medication. Probably the best is Malarone. Lariam is also effective but has got some bad news because of side effects. You should also use another protection against malaria, namely a mosquito net at night (all lodges should provide this) and insect repellant. You should also spray the mosquito nets with insect poison, but do this not immediately before going to bed. Instead air the room after applying the spray. Apply insect repellant for textiles to your clothes before spending time out in the evening, like in open dinner rooms. The nice thing is that these measures also protect you from other, rarer insect-borne diseases like yellow fever. Hans-Georg  SignatureNo mail, please. > By far the most dangerous health risk is malaria. You must do > something against it, and I recommend to take prophylactic [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > The nice thing is that these measures also protect you from > other, rarer insect-borne diseases like yellow fever. All excellent advice. Also remember to use the malaria medication for the recommended period before and after your trip. If you experience influenza-type symptoms on return, tell your medical practitioner that you've visited Tanzania. It's also a good idea to wear clothes which cover your wrists and ankles - long sleeve shirts, long trousers, desert boots or similar. SignatureSimon Elliott http://www.ctsn.co.uk If you can't afford decent medical advice, you can't afford to travel! By all means visit the website suggested, but then print out the relevant pages and show them to your physician! Any medications that you currently take will affect the immunisations that you need, as will the type of holiday that you plan to take. david, i can afford decent medical advice. but the doctors that i spoke to say it is up to me to weigh the risks. obviously they push the full vacination list in excess of 300$, but if all i need are malaria prescriptions then it is kind of a waste of money, no? the doctor i spoke to recommended hepA vacinnation. As a sidenote i am in my mid-20s and in perfect physical condition and not allergic to any known substance. > If you can't afford decent medical advice, you can't afford to travel! > > By all means visit the website suggested, but then print out the > relevant pages and show them to your physician! Any medications that > you currently take will affect the immunisations that you need, as will > the type of holiday that you plan to take. > david, > > i can afford decent medical advice. but the doctors that i spoke to say it > is up to me to weigh the risks. obviously they push the full vacination list > in excess of 300$, but if all i need are malaria prescriptions then it is > kind of a waste of money, no? That's for you to decide, right enough, but even when I started travelling and the jags were on the NHS, our doctor still encouraged us to take the full list. Slainte Liz SignatureVirtual Liz now at http://www.v-liz.com Kenya; Tanzania; Namibia; India; Seychelles; Galapagos "I speak of Africa and golden joys" >That's for you to decide, right enough, but even when I started >travelling and the jags were on the NHS, our doctor still encouraged >us to take the full list. Liz, does that surprise you? Everybody likes to be important (and to make money). And people tend to overestimate the importance of what they do. (:-) The next time you talk to a doctor about such issues, ask for probability figures of infection. That will teach you an interesting lesson. These doctors, who gladly recommend this or that, have no clue. For good measure, ask them about probability figures for side effects as well. What we know is that the risk of contracting any disease is roughly proportional to the time we spend. So when you stay in a place for months, it is many times more sensible to take precautions than if you stay only for, say, two weeks. Hans-Georg SignatureNo mail, please. In message <b2e78153rt2d9s8b4lroe4fbo2s76l3jt1@4ax.com> Hans-Georg Michna <hans-georgNoEmailPlease@michna.com> wrote: >>That's for you to decide, right enough, but even when I started >>travelling and the jags were on the NHS, our doctor still encouraged [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > make money). And people tend to overestimate the importance of > what they do. (:-) I thought it was significant, because when they were prescribing on the NHS, each clinic was on a budget, and prescribing us travel jags would reduce the money they had to spend on other patients, so I reckon they thought that the cost was better spent in the preventative stage than having to pay to cure anything we might come back with! Now we have to pay for most travel jabs, the first time it was only Yellow fever. Actually one year we had to get meningitis jabs because a strain had broken out in Kenya. By that time, we had to pay, and they cost us at the time 10GBP each. We had hoped to be with the driver/guide we'd had the previous year, and were upset to discover his wife had just died of the very strain of meningitis we'd spend only £10 to prevent. Of course, our risk of catching it was significantly less. Just like insurance, while many people choose not to insure, or to under-insure, I sleep better at night if I'm covered (medically and insurance-wise) for the foreseeable possibilities, while knowing that not everything is risk-assessable - and that insurance companies are, in general, a lot of charlatans who will wriggle out of anything they possibly can wriggle out of. :-( Of course, it's a decision everyone has to make for themselves. However, if we choose not to take preventative measures, do we have the right to expect to be treated on the NHS if we go down with something which could have been prevented (I know this isn't an issue in countries without a state health system). Slainte Liz SignatureVirtual Liz now at http://www.v-liz.com Kenya; Tanzania; Namibia; India; Seychelles; Galapagos "I speak of Africa and golden joys" >Of course, it's a decision everyone has to make for themselves. >However, if we choose not to take preventative measures, do we have >the right to expect to be treated on the NHS if we go down with >something which could have been prevented (I know this isn't an issue >in countries without a state health system). Liz, I think yes, because no prevention may have been the better choice. However you choose, you have some residual risk, which you should bear consciously, and the NHS should appreciate that too. For example, the treatment for one unlucky person of 10,000 may be cheaper than prevention for 10,000, and the total risk of the side effects of prevention may be higher than the total risk of the disease in question. Or perhaps it's more like 100,000? one million? How many tourists have recently died of the disease? What, this question cannot be answered? How then can anybody make a rational decision? These decisions are a bit difficult and can be impossible to make rationally if you can't get the actual numbers, i.e. quantify the risks. Then it becomes a matter of belief, and that means that a simple-minded person will act out of fear, rather than rationally. He will simply pick the most obvious fear, the one of dying from the disease in question, and decide to do something about that, while totally ignoring side effects and costs. You can see that I'm a deeply rooted skeptic. (:-) Hans-Georg SignatureNo mail, please. |
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