An exotic country somewhere in Africa or Southeast Asia is a great destination for travelers who are not used to following traditional routes. And the threat of an unknown disease is not an excuse to give up your plans. In most cases, problems can be avoided by a single vaccination. Today we discuss the vaccines for travelers.

What exactly do I need to protect myself from?

Vaccines Many of our vaccines have been made in childhood, such as hepatitis B and polio. Therefore, it is better to know in advance what vaccinations and when you were given. Having gone through the list in detail, there are very few items left — only the following vaccines that must be delivered.
  1. First, it is tetanus. Needed in order to ensure that in the case of cuts, wounds, stab wounds do not earn acute bacterial disease.
  2. Second, typhoid fever. Abdominal typhoid is an acute cyclically flowing intestinal anthroponotic infection. Such a contagion can be caught with food and drinks. These two vaccinations are recommended for any traveler. Wherever you go.
  3. Further, you can also vaccinate against yellow fever. In some countries, entry is only allowed if this vaccine is available.
  4. The epidemiologists also recommend making vaccines against viral meningitis. The disease is transmitted viral and can be caught in any water body.
Thus, if you have been vaccinated against lethal diseases in childhood, only 4 vaccinations remained.

Make a 1-month pause

It is also better to administer vaccines not all at once, and at least at intervals of a month, in order not to give the body a strong overload. You should take care of this no later than a month before the expected date of the trip: this is the time it takes for the body to develop immunity after vaccination. Keep in mind that if a vaccination is voluntary when travelling to some countries, it will have to be done in order to travel to other countries. Find out about the epidemic situation in the country where you are going to go.

FAQ about travel vaccines

How do vaccinations work?

There are four options:
  1. You are choosing a weakened version of the pathogen that looks like a real one, but does not threaten your health. This is how vaccinations against chickenpox, flu and yellow fever work.
  2. Show the body "corpses" of viruses and bacteria. The immune system finds them and trains to kill them again and again, because it is "burning" for a reason. When the body gets a familiar strain, the immune system will know what to do with it. Examples: hepatitis A, tick-borne encephalitis, rabies.
  3. Introduce anatoxins — weakened or altered versions of the toxins of microorganisms. In this case, the body will learn to fight the effects of bacteria, which will give much more time for countermeasures during infection. There are no symptoms of the disease, the body is quietly dealing with pathogens, and you do not even know that they were. This is how tetanus vaccination works.
  4. The hightech category includes gene complex modifiers, molecular vaccines, and so on. This is how they fight hepatitis B, human papillomavirus and meningococcus.

What are the side effects?

The most common case is an allergic reaction. For example, a hepatitis B vaccine can exacerbate your allergies to yeast dough. There are more complex reactions, but in general they are all reversible. Most of the side effects are due to the fact that you release a weakened virus, toxin, molecular debris and other exogenous things into your body. To teach the immune system to fight, you first need to "hit" it a little bit. It will give you an answer, and furniture can get hurt. But this is the right part of training.

Does the vaccine only work on one virus strain?

If you are vaccinated against one strain of flu, the immune response will be faster if you are infected with another strain. It guarantees a lower risk of complications, and less symptoms. This applies only to similar strains of the same disease. Meningitis is caused by very different sets of meningococcal meningococcal disease, and they need different vaccines. In other words, the vaccine contains one or more strains of the most common pathogen type. It helps to develop resistance to them and their close versions, speeding up the response time to their slightly longer versions.

Do vaccines protect you forever?

No. Some allow you to develop lifelong immunity, some work for a long time (e.g. 10 years of diphtheria), some for a very short time (Japanese encephalitis for 1 year). Then the effectiveness of the antibodies and their production slowly decrease. It's a good idea to update what you need to update, and then add some basic "long-lasting" things, and then to be vaccinated before dangerous journeys.