The Bottom Line
- Incredibly comprehensive travel health information
- Condensed excerpts and customizable reports free online to whet your appetite
- Maps depicting troublesome health and safety areas world wide
- Kinda big to haul around while traveling
- Hardcover book is about $25 - much can gleaned free online
Description
- Chapter 1: General recommendations for travelers' vaccinations
- Chapter 2: Trip planning health and safety tips, health care abroad, general risks
- Chapter 3: Geographic health hazards - Africa, Americas, Asia, Middle East, Europe, South Pacific
- Chapter 4: River blindness, mad cow disease - lurid list of specific disease symptoms and outcomes
- Chapter 5: Yellow Fever and malaria risk by country
- Chapter 6: Jet lag, motion sickness, altitude illness, sunburn, poisonous seafood, animal attacks
- Chapter 7: Transportation issues - airplane and ship travel hazards and death overseas
Guide Review - CDC Yellow Book 2005-2006
Ah - okay. Face it, world travelers: you do need to know what kind of worms want to crawl into your orifices in South American rivers and how to find health care abroad. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Yellow Book gives you the skinny on every imaginable horrifying sickness possibilty (and some you never imagined) and prevention thereof (including NONE), where you can pick up appalling bugs and vicious viruses, and observations regarding hitherto seemingly simple travel stuff like flying: "discomfort" (think abject agony) from sinus infections and "abdominal bloating" (think uncontrollable farting and general seatmate malcontent).
Hypochondriac handbook or practical health and safety guidebook? Both. Curl up with CDC's Yellow Book for some fascinating fireside reading with this in mind: take what you need to know and then set this aside in favor of books like Party Europe 2005 (although you might also want to check out the Yellow Book's section on sexually transmitted diseases...ahem) or other less intense guidebooks.
"Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the journey."
--Babs Hoffman
