Gap year students or "gappers" are working so hard to raise money
for the coming year that they often forget, or don’t want to ‘waste’ money
on, their vaccinations. Parents have to interfere.
The reputation of the gap year may be tarnished by the rich kids whose parents
dole out £25-30,000 to conduct a year-long international networking party,
but one thing remains the same. Virtually all gappers will visit areas where
malaria and dengue fever is endemic, and diseases like Yellow fever, cholera
and hepatitis lurk. Almost all are potential killers.
What’s more, some countries won’t let you across their borders without proof
of the correct jabs. Gappers need to get their jabs and carry their
vaccination certificates with them.
Some gappers simply don’t get round to it in the same way that they don’t get
round to buying insurance. In both cases the failure is not simply down to
indolence on their parts. Raising a huge lump of money for a gap year isn’t
easy – why spend it on health stuff (and indeed insurance) when you are
financially stretched? Also, every gapper thinks that he or she is
invulnerable and bad stuff only happens to daft people (i.e. not them).
This is why parents have to step in and take the offspring to a GP or specialist
clinic to get all the health issues sorted. Giving Gappers the money and
telling them to sort it out themselves rarely works.
Timing is also crucial. They may need to have jabs or start a course of
malaria prophylactics a couple of months before travelling. And, at this
time of year in particular, you can’t always get an appointment right away.
I reckon it’s best to begin by researching the travel health sites listed,
below, and then making an appointment with your local surgery, assuming the
practice includes a vaccination clinic. Even so check out the prices at your
local surgery against the rest because the NHS is not always the cheapest
and, yes, it does always charge for travel health preparation.
Masta has
its own clinics and so does Nomad
which specialises in kitting people out for adventurous travel – they
look after Royal Geographical
Society expeditions for instance.
For up to date travel information and sound advice, several health
professionals I spoke to recommend Masta. I found Masta’s site cumbersome
but Fit for Travel , an
NHS site, was much easier to use with at-a-glance maps showing the risks of
various diseases throughout the world (although as I drifted through the
site I noticed that 254 cases of Chikungunya have been reported in Italy,
one of my favourite destinations).
The World Health Organisation’s site
brought on similar fits of agoraophobia with news of cholera outbreaks in
Iraq, and Ebola in the Congo. The WHO site is good for up-to-date
information about prevalent diseases throughout the world. The Government’s
Gap year advice is good both medically and more generally – it includes
a saluatory story about someone taking photographs of police in a
less-than-understanding area of East Africa, the lesson being that police
can be very sensitive about pictures.
The National Travel Health Network
and Centre, NaTHNaC, has good basic travel health information plus
telephone numbers for tropical medecine hospitals. The American site, Centers
for Disease Control Prevention is user friendly and informative.
A lot of these sites sell ready-made health kits with everything from plasters
to pain killers but I reckon that gappers are better off making their own
kits just so long as they take one and pack it into a waterproof container.
The health kit is another area where your local GP might be a helpful source
of advice.
Once abroad gappers should keep this link to Travel
Health which lists international health clinics. And if you want your
gappers to be scared into travel health preparations, get them to have a
look at Great
Gap Years. I thought the picture showed a generic gapper beside someone
dressed as a microbe. I think that the microbe is supposed to be a 'health
worker', but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
Finally, don’t forget condoms. Any parent who is completely certain that their
gapper won’t do it before marriage needs to take a reality check. So what if
the condoms return un-used? You will only have proved yourself right.
