Travel health advice
The Health Protection Agency does not give travel health advice to individual members of the public by telephone or by email. The first point of call for travel health advice should be your general practitioner (GP), practice nurse, or a specialised travel clinic. Travel health advice should ideally be sought at least one month before departure in case vaccinations or preventative malaria medication are required for your trip. If, however, you have booked a holiday at the last minute, you should still ensure you see a travel health practitioner before departure, particularly if you are travelling to a tropical destination.
The Travel and Migrant Health Section is a collaborating partner with the National Travel Health Network and Centre (NaTHNaC). NaTHNaC has been created to promote clinical standards in travel medicine by improving the quality of travel health advice available to GP practices and other health care providers.
On 1 November 2007, NaTHNaC launched their new website resources: Country Information Pages and the Disease Outbreak Database. These resources are designed to educate the health professional and the traveller about possible risks and hazards they may encounter in any country and how best to prevent them. The Disease Outbreak Database is searchable by country, disease, and date and provides a summary of global health events that may be of concern to the traveller. These resources are freely available at http://www.nathnac.org/ds/map_world.aspx. NaTHNaC also have further information especially developed for the travelling public at http://www.nathnac.org/travel/index.htm.
The following sources of information about travel-associated infections may also be useful:
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Last reviewed: 10 January 2008