Ephemerica

Last Friday, Cindy and I went to the Travel Clinic at Hall Health at UW. We spent an hour talking with a nurse who helped us figure out what immunizations we both would need for our trip. Here’s the list for traveling in Central/South America:

• Hepatitis A & B
• Yellow Fever
• Typhoid
• Rabies

We both got the Hep and Yellow Fever shots at the visit, and received typhoid oral tablets. Somewhat thankfully, I had received a series of rabies vaccinations during my first year of grad school when I did my rotation in Ellen Covey’s lab, which works with bats. I was a little worried I might have to re-take the series because the recordkeeping by Employee Health was a little shoddy—less because of the shots and more because the series costs > $600!—by far the most expensive of the bunch. Anyway, my records were found…but unfortunately Cindy still had to get the rabies shots.

Round 2 of shots was this morning…my arm is still sore from last week’s shots, so I asked for mine in the other arm. Two weeks until we go in for the last round.

We will also have to take anti-malarial drugs while we’re there. We can take chloroquine while in Mexico and Central America, but won’t be able to take that in South America (the critter is apparently chloroquine-resistant down there). We got a mini-script for mefloquine…the nurse recommended it as the best drug (only taken once/week), but apparently it has some pretty nasty neuronal side effects like night terrors and possible psychotic episodes. I figure we can each take it one at a time and see what happens…looking forward to some funky dreams

Posted by Matthew on August 25th, 2006 | Filed under: Pre-trip Planning