A major part of our journey preparation has focused on our health, as we’ll be traveling across several continents, exploring some remote areas and we’re not as young as we use to be.
The first thing we did was to organise a consultation with a travel doctor. We’re very fortunate to have access to an expert travel clinic in Brisbane – Dr Deb’s – The Travel Doctor.
During our initial hour long consultation with Dr. Jo-Anne, we mapped out our intended travel zones and discussed what vaccines we had previously received, those that were essential for our trip (like yellow fever for travel in Africa) others highly recommended and pre-exposure treatments for diseases like rabies.
We also discussed the provision of prescription medicines that we could pack in a medicine kit to treat ailments along the way – something we would collect on our last visit to the clinic. Dr. Jo then prescribed a vaccination plan that would see us return to the clinic an additional four times before departure.
My vaccination schedule looked like this:
Visit 1
Initial blood tests for existing antibodies
Yellow Fever
Tetanus / Diphtheria / Whooping Cough / Polio
Rabies pre-exposure 1
Visit 2
Rabies pre-exposure 2
Visit 3
Japanese Encephalitis
Rabies pre-exposure 3
Visit 4
Flu Vaccine
