If you are planning a journey overseas, you may wonder what travel health services you need. By talking to a GP or pharmacist, as well as by checking reliable sources like the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website, you can find out what you need to do.
In many cases, an overseas trip won’t require you to get any jabs or take anti-malarial tablets; you certainly won’t need to do this if your next holiday involves skiing in the Alps or a European city break. But a visit to tropical countries is a different matter.
Getting vaccinated, whether against hepatitis, yellow fever or any other threat, used to be something most people would do without hesitation. However, in recent years, scepticism and hesitancy about vaccines have become rife.
Once the preserve of cranks and the ‘holistic’ medicine industry, such quackery started spreading with the now-discredited claims by Dr Andrew Wakefield that MMR vaccines caused autism, based on a wrong conclusion based on the coincidence that the age when MMR vaccines are delivered is around the time when autism symptoms will start to show.
However, the anti-vax movement has become more vociferous in recent years due to the pandemic, with successful, life-saving mass vaccination programmes posing an existential threat to the credibility of the movement.
Having failed to persuade most people not to take the vaccine, the movement now relies on exaggerated and often false claims of large-scale vaccine-related death and injury. If you have been exposed to this, you may be forgiven for wondering what terrible things could happen if you get a jab before travelling.
Debates have been particularly fierce in America, where, to widespread shock, one of the most prominent vaccine sceptics and purveyors of misinformation, Robert F Kennedy Jr, (also known as RFK Jr) has been appointed health secretary in the new Trump administration. No wonder the value of stock in vaccine manufacturers has fallen.
RFK Jr has insisted he won’t be stopping people getting their vaccines, but doubtless, anti-vaxxers everywhere will have been emboldened.
However, it is worth noting that even RFK Jr would need to get his jabs if he wanted to visit some of the countries that Britons frequently visit.
Take Kenya and its neighbour Tanzania, for example. If you fancy a safari in the Masai Mara, a trek up Kilimanjaro or a beach trip to Mombasa or Zanzibar, you will need your yellow fever jabs.
You will also need certification of this if passing between them, as entering these countries from another nation listed as having yellow fever requires this step under the International Health Regulations 2005.
What that means is that anyone who is adamant they will not get a vaccine could find they are refused entry to a country, just as was, for a short time, the case with Covid. There are no exceptions for ‘important’ people, as Novak Djokovic discovered.
It may be that RFK Jr is in no hurry to visit East Africa anytime soon. But if you are, getting your jabs is not just a major health benefit, but also as important as your passport for getting through the border.