How to Stay Healthy on the Road
How to Stay Healthy on the Road
June 30, 2000 -- This is a story about a travel-health nightmare that started one October day 18 years ago. Thirty-year-old Kevin Wessell was working in Africa for a Massachusetts architectural firm.
He came home to the U.S. for Christmas that year. But within days, he developed a distressing set of symptoms, including trouble swallowing and tingling about the arms and shoulders. Doctors admitted Wessell to Waltham Hospital just outside Boston, where he spent the next month battling one of nature's toughest foes -- rabies.
Wessell lost that fight, even though just a tidbit of information might've saved him. It is this: "I spent five years in Third World countries in my 'previous life,'" says Joel Rosenstock, MD, MPH, of the Peachtree Travel Clinic in Atlanta. "If I ever got bitten by a mammal, the treatment would be a jet plane" -- immediately.
In Africa, Wessell had been bitten by a dog -- an animal that in the U.S. almost never transmits rabies. But that is not the case overseas. "Outside the United States, the main [rabies] reservoir is the dog," Rosenstock says. "Rabies is an Ebola-frightening-type disease. You get it, you die."
Fortunately, most overseas travel isn't fraught with rabies-like risks. Travel health experts suggest it's easy to walk that fine line between carefree enjoyment and reckless adventurism -- if you follow a couple of rules.
Take food, for example. "The critical point to remember is that the food and water are not bad, it's the contamination by food-service workers and their germs," Rosenstock says. "So, eat food people can't touch. People can't touch hot food, because they can get burned. So I don't eat things that are cool. I don't eat salads, I don't eat fruit -- unless I can peel it."
Water may be a less effective transmitter of disease than food, but that hardly means what's flowing from the tap is safe. The trouble is, in some Third World countries bottled water is nothing more than "tap with a cap." Rosenstock's advice: Stick with bottled carbonated beverages and beer.
The food advice doesn't apply so much to Western Europe or Australia, where modern sanitation is a given, but it applies to even the finest hotels in Third World countries. "The upscale hotels still employ the people in back who live in the shanties around the city," Rosenstock says. "Even though it's fancy, the guy that's making your food is not so fancy."
How to Stay Healthy on the Road
June 30, 2000 -- This is a story about a travel-health nightmare that started one October day 18 years ago. Thirty-year-old Kevin Wessell was working in Africa for a Massachusetts architectural firm.
He came home to the U.S. for Christmas that year. But within days, he developed a distressing set of symptoms, including trouble swallowing and tingling about the arms and shoulders. Doctors admitted Wessell to Waltham Hospital just outside Boston, where he spent the next month battling one of nature's toughest foes -- rabies.
Wessell lost that fight, even though just a tidbit of information might've saved him. It is this: "I spent five years in Third World countries in my 'previous life,'" says Joel Rosenstock, MD, MPH, of the Peachtree Travel Clinic in Atlanta. "If I ever got bitten by a mammal, the treatment would be a jet plane" -- immediately.
In Africa, Wessell had been bitten by a dog -- an animal that in the U.S. almost never transmits rabies. But that is not the case overseas. "Outside the United States, the main [rabies] reservoir is the dog," Rosenstock says. "Rabies is an Ebola-frightening-type disease. You get it, you die."
Fortunately, most overseas travel isn't fraught with rabies-like risks. Travel health experts suggest it's easy to walk that fine line between carefree enjoyment and reckless adventurism -- if you follow a couple of rules.
Take food, for example. "The critical point to remember is that the food and water are not bad, it's the contamination by food-service workers and their germs," Rosenstock says. "So, eat food people can't touch. People can't touch hot food, because they can get burned. So I don't eat things that are cool. I don't eat salads, I don't eat fruit -- unless I can peel it."
Water may be a less effective transmitter of disease than food, but that hardly means what's flowing from the tap is safe. The trouble is, in some Third World countries bottled water is nothing more than "tap with a cap." Rosenstock's advice: Stick with bottled carbonated beverages and beer.
The food advice doesn't apply so much to Western Europe or Australia, where modern sanitation is a given, but it applies to even the finest hotels in Third World countries. "The upscale hotels still employ the people in back who live in the shanties around the city," Rosenstock says. "Even though it's fancy, the guy that's making your food is not so fancy."