About our Travel Clinics.

Travel Medicine:
A developing speciality

The past 20 years have seen a huge increase in global tourist travel for holiday, business, visiting friends and relatives and volunteering in remote areas of developing countries or as aid workers responding to natural disaster situations.

Travel medicine emerged as a specialty in 1991, with the formation of the International Society for Travel Medicine (ISTM).

The Rise in Travel

This rise in travel has been associated with a rise in travel-related illness and death which is often preventable.

Malaria is one of the most serious treatable travel-related disease, with around 1,500 to 2,000 cases and 10-15 preventable deaths in the UK each year. There is growing concern that with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on control measures and emerging drug resistance these numbers could rise.

Common sense measures can also reduce the risk of other infections such as travellers’ diarrhoea, viral hepatitis, HIV and schistosomiasis (a disease caused by parasitic worms).

The increase in illness caused by travel-related disease underlines the importance of travellers getting individually tailored advice to protect their health. Book in with a travel medicine specialist today.