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Battling Real Y2K Bugs: Travel Medicine |
| Section: LIFE / HEALTH |
| Author: Daniella Ashkenazy |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2000 |
| Size: 2,327 Words, 15,194 Characters |
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Late last summer, a German journalist made headlines when he arrived home from the Ivory Coast with symptoms similar to Ebola. While the patient died, fear that the dreaded disease that inspired the movie Outbreak had "jumped" from the heart of Africa to Europe turned out to be a false alarm. This past fall, it was America's turn to sweat when thirty-five people became sick and five died from what authorities believed was West Nile fever, a virus harbored in the blood of exotic birds.
Both incidents are signs of the time, as were the Coca-Cola salesman who returned from Siberia with a strange, nonhealing skin ulcer and the fly fisherman who came back from the Chilean Andes with a puzzling high fever. What did these two bring home as unsuspected "baggage" undeclared at customs? Today it is possible for a patient to walk into a family doctor's office in a poor barrio or plush suburb somewhere in the Western world carrying any one of 320 infectious diseases or 1,000 pathogens--most of them rare afflictions lurking in once-isolated regions of the Third World. The fact that one can be halfway across the globe in sixteen hours led to the creation of a new medical field early in the 1990s: travel medicine.
The crux of the problem: Even specialists in infectious diseases have trouble keeping track of developments in exotic diseases and where they are appearing or reemerging, now that people are traveling ever farther afield. A specialist practicing in India may have little expertise in Peruvian d...
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...s/clinindex.html).
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov/travel) in Atlanta has a Web site that offers excellent pretravel health information.
Publications
The mainstream professional journal devoted to travel medicine, the Journal of Travel Medicine, is published by the International Society of Travel Medicine and is accessible on-line (www.istm.org/jtm.html).
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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