Originally published February 21 2006
Travel medicine study identifies the health risks specific to certain places
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Dr. David Freedman discusses the importance of GeoSentinel, a network of travel medicine clinics that has helped doctors identify what illnesses pose the greatest risk for travelers in various regions of the world.
Visitors to exotic locales have long been warned not to drink the water.
But tourists also face plenty of other health dangers -- including food, mosquitoes and bugs on the ground -- and much of the travel advice is based on data from the 1980s or small, one-country studies.
Now, the records of ill travelers treated at a network of 30 travel-medicine clinics on six continents, called GeoSentinel, have yielded the most comprehensive picture yet of the illnesses most likely to strike visitors to particular regions of the Third World.
"This is a real blueprint" for doctors, said Dr. David Freedman, lead researcher of a study reported in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
Each year, about 8 percent of the more than 50 million travelers to developing countries become sick enough to seek health care during their trip or when they return home.
Depending on the destination, up to two-thirds become sick, most with short-lived diarrhea, skin problems and respiratory infections.
And foreign travel, including business trips and immigrants' visits back home, is on the rise, with more than 760 million people crossing borders in 2004.
GeoSentinel's records on 17,353 ill tourists treated from 1996 through 2004, after their return home from 230 developing nations, show many illnesses were not apparent for a while: More than one-third of the patients became sick over a month after they got back, and one in 10 fell ill more than six months later.
The records showed many had lingering diarrhea from infections by parasites, now more common than bacterial diarrhea; dengue fever has become more prevalent than malaria in most regions; and infections from tick bites are now a big problem in sub-Saharan Africa.
Dr. Rajendra Kapila, an infectious disease specialist at University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, said the database provides good clues for doctors to follow.
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