Tips for Healthy Travel
Whether you travel for the holidays, go on extended summer vacations, or travel for business, chances are you will be faced with new germs. Airplanes contain hundreds of germs in one place, but even traveling by car means you're being introduced to new strains of the common cold. Here is a resource guide about how to stay well while traveling, as well as links to past epidemics — and how to avoid them!
Safety & Health Standards – Past Epidemics
Safety & Health Standards
- Staying Healthy While You Travel comes from KidsHealth.org. Parents know that traveling with children can present its own germy challenges, and this site helps keep the kiddos healthy on the road. Teachers will also find this site helpful about keeping themselves—and their students—germ-free.
- International Travel: Tips for Staying Healthy is a no-nonsense site with advice directly from doctors. Whether or not you're leaving the country, you'll still find these tips helpful.
- Planning for Healthy Travel comes directly from the foremost authorty on health and wellness—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention This is just chapter one of a long treatise on staying well. The first chapter has the most basic travel information, but feel free to read all nine chapters.
- Healthy Travel Tips are never more critical than when flying—airplanes are basically petri dishes with wings. Delta Airlines has years of experience with the hazards of flying, and their corporate website presents some of the best tips they've learned over the years.
- Prevention: Travel has some of the best information about staying healthy while traveling. Prevention Magazine is one of the leading resources for doctors and healthcare providers, so take advantage of this combined knowledge next time you take a trip. Learn everything about preventing illness or even traveling with a chronic illness.
Past Epidemics
- WHO: Influenza Learn about the leading seasonal and travel releated sickness—the flu—from the World Health Organization. Here is information about past epidemics, research into the cure, and information about what influenza strain might be coming up next.
- When Germs Travel is the history of past epidemics that traveled the United States and the panic they unleashed. This article originally appeared as a book under the same name by Dr. Howard Markel. However, if you don't want to spend $25 and just want the quick synopsis, this review is extremely interesting and informative.
- Epidemics in the United States comes from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which means that the information here is both informative and in-depth. Take a look at the various epidemics and how the U.S. government responded.
- Major US Epidemics offers a quick timeline of the various diseases that swept our country. This site specializes in American "disasters," so if you're interested in also investigating volcanic eruptions and how to survive a disaster, check out the other links at this site, too.
- Pandemics Information, from the Federal Communications Commission, takes a look at past pandemics (world-wide epidemics of various diseases), and offers advice on how to avoid becoming invovled in a pandemic yourself. The thought of wide-spread sickness can be extremely scary, but this logical and detailed site should calm fears.