Travel medicine: profiling an emerging specialty

Abstract

Travel medicine is a new multidisciplinary specialty catering for an increasing number of travellers worldwide. It is an integral part of military medicine. Travel medicine specialists provide pre-travel health advice, chemoprophylaxis against travel-related diseases, traveller’s medical kits, and post-travel assessments and eradication treatment for various travel-related diseases. They also liaise with public health authorities on possible imported disease risks. Vector-borne diseases, in particular malaria and the arboviruses, stand out as major concerns for military deployments, but common problems, such as travellers’ diarrhoea and respiratory tract infection, also need to be addressed. Travel and aviation medicine have many linkages, especially in terms of fitness to fly and dealing with problems that may arise in travellers due to physiological and psychological stresses of travel. Increasingly, the discipline of refugee and migrant medicine is also being included in the specialty area of travel medicine.