Summer Health - Travel health

Every year, Britons make over 60 million trips abroad - that's nearly one trip for every one of us. For holiday-makers, cheap air travel means more trips to exotic destinations than ever before.

These days, most travellers have a great time - perhaps over-indulging in food and drink or suffering mild sunburn. Thanks to advances in medical research, and in particular due to the good vaccines that are available for many diseases, few travellers contract serious infectious diseases while abroad. Nevertheless for people travelling to developing countries, some threats still remain: cholera, malaria and Dengue fever amongst others.

Malaria, for example, kills more than 1 million people in the developing world each year and contributes indirectly to many more deaths, particularly in children. But travellers, by following medical advice and taking care with hygiene, can largely protect themselves from the risks of malaria and other developing world diseases.

Health risks from infectious diseases fall into three broad categories:

• Food and waterborne: Risky activities include bathing and swimming as well as eating contaminated food, drinking untreated water or using unclean water for tooth brushing.
• Insect borne: usually transmitted through insect bites
• Other sources: body fluids or air

Next Section: Food and waterborne