Travel Medicine: What's That?

Abstract

“Travel medicine-what’s that?” is frequently asked when we show our business card. Travel medicine is a new interdisciplinary field (Fig. 1) that has as its primary goal keeping travelers alive and healthy. In addition, travel medicine attempts to minimize the impact of illness and accidents by various, albeit limited, means of self-treatment. To achieve these goals, it is necessary first of all to quantitate the health risks by independent research (Fig. 2). From such results it is possible to rank preventive measures in order of priority. The art of travel medicine lies in the careful selection of necessary preventive strategies while avoiding those measures that may cause unnecessary adverse events, costs, or inconvenience. One basic precept is that future travelers should not be protected against rare diseases while simultaneously being left exposed to frequently occurring diseases of comparable severity. The mainstays of travel medicine include the following: