Protect yourself and your family with a pre-travel consultation before returning to visit your native country.
Travelers returning to their home country to visit friends and relatives (VFRs) are actually at higher risk of becoming seriously ill than are regular tourists.
For instance, VFRs are eight times more likely to be diagnosed with malaria than are tourist travelers and experience a higher incidence of travel-related infectious diseases such as hepatitis A, typhoid fever and tuberculosis.1
This occurs for a variety of reasons:
- Lack of awareness of risk.
- Financial or cultural barriers to pre-travel medical care.
- Higher risk activities when traveling to familiar surroundings and living the local lifestyle which may include unsafe food and water.
- A false sense of security, believing that they are already immune to local diseases.
- Last minute travel and longer trips.
1. Geosentinel Surveillance Network data