Transcription:

Bill Klaproth (Host): That big international trip is coming up and you can’t wait. So, as you prepare to pack and figure out who is going to watch the house and take care of the dog, let me ask you this. Are you also preparing your health, making sure you are immunized and other health preparations before you leave? No, no? Well, then let’s tell you what you need to know when preparing for international travel including immunizations and other advice. With us is Shari Larsen, a Registered Nurse and the International Travel Advice and Immunization Clinic Coordinator at Pullman Regional Hospital. Shari, thank you for being here. So, what does the Travel Clinic do at Pullman Regional Hospital?

Shari Larsen, RN (Guest): We are basically a full travel clinic. We do consultations for whatever international country that they are going to. Somebody makes a plan, gets the plane tickets, they need to know what it is that they need to be able to go. Not only is it required but also recommended for different countries. So, we give the full consultation. We also give the immunizations that are required for those countries and also the medications that they may need while they are there, i.e., malaria or something like altitude sickness or something like that.

Host: So, you call those travel vaccines, is that right?

Shari: Yeah. Generally, what people don’t know is a lot of the travel vaccines that we talk about are the same exact routine vaccinations that we use here in this country. There’s a couple of them that are different. But a lot of them are exactly the same.

Host: Okay, so what are some of the differences then between travel vaccines and routine vaccines?

Shari: So, routine vaccinations are usually done when you are very young. It includes your tetanus, and your diphtheria and your measles, mumps, rubella, polio. Now they have got Rotavirus and they’ve got a whole gamut, hepatitis A and B and everything.

For international travel, and frankly for some travel within the United States; we are going to be concentrating more on making sure that you can eat, therefore we are looking at hepatitis A and typhoid. Different behaviors bring on hepatitis B and a lot of measles in the world right now, so we are looking at measles, we are looking at cholera if needed, although it’s not needed very often. Then when you start getting into the serious places like Africa or South America, we are looking at yellow fever, also in Asia, you have got Japanese encephalitis and these are vaccines that you are never going to run into here, at least presently. But you will when you start travelling abroad.

Host: So, do you know which vaccines are required with each country? So, if I come to you and say I’m going to Africa. You say to me well, you’re going to need this, this, this and this. And I imagine, is that one of the big differences why someone would go to the Travel Clinic instead of going to a primary care physician or a pharmacy?

Shari: Absolutely. So, what I use is TRAVAX. It is basically the most common used website that we have. It takes the CDC, the World Health Organization and a few other travel medical sites and it compiles everything together and sends it off to me. And it’s pretty broadly used throughout the country and you go to the bigger ones like say Harborview Travel Clinic or some of those bigger places in Seattle and everything and they will use the same thing we do. We pull up a country. The country then basically I can print it off and this is what I do for patients too. We print off everything and it shows all the immunizations that are needed. Also any medications that are needed, any other thing like bug and mosquito related. You’ve got leishmaniasis. You’ve got malaria. You’ve got dengue fever. You’ve got Zika. You’ve got Chikungunya and a lot of those terms most people are not going to know what they are talking about. But you deal with that all throughout the world. We don’t have much except for in the lower part of the country. The southern, in Florida, we’ve heard Zika. We’ve also heard dengue fever in Florida and Hawaii and Texas.

So, there are some things here in the United States. We don’t deal with it up here, but we definitely have it in the United States and for that matter, it is expected to be spreading.

Host: Wow, there’s a lot of things to look out for. This sounds like one stop shopping. I come to you and you make it easy and you tell me what I need to get. So, how soon before travelling should someone make an appointment at the Travel Clinic?

Shari: Preferably give me at least a month. I would like six to eight weeks prior to. If you don’t hit in that time, we may be able to see you closer to your departure time, but that really does kind of stymie my possibility of getting all those immunizations in.

Host: All right. So, I call you. I tell you that I’m travelling out of the country. I’m going to Africa. And you say okay, you’re going to need this, this and this. we will see you in two months. When I come in, then you have all those immunizations ready for me at that point?

Shari: Actually you leave in two months, you call, I say I’ll see you on the next day and we give you the immunizations, so it’s all done plus all the medications like malaria meds and everything. We give antibiotics for traveler’s diarrhea. We have them get this DEET. We have them get all this stuff already and then when they go in two months, they are ready to go without any problems.

Host: Oh, okay, so it’s that quick. Like I call you today, by tomorrow or the next day; you know what I need and have all of the vaccines.

Shari: So, that’s the nice thing about here and this is where the pharmacy and the doctor’s office are going to be the big difference. So, let’s start at the doctor’s office. The doctor’s office can look it up, if they will and it’s hard to understand and they don’t have the stuff that we have. They also don’t deal with it as much as we do. It’s really, really so hard for a doctor to keep up on that. We are updated every day. And we are able to see what’s going on throughout the world. That’s the first thing I do when I come in is, I look and see what kind of alerts.

So, the doctor’s offices don’t have time to look it all up and research it all. They also don’t have the immunizations. Immunizations in this country are subsidized by the state, you can have, if you are 18 or younger. But once you hit 19 years old, doctor’s offices don’t carry the immunizations. So they tell you to go to the public health department. In this region, public health department doesn’t really have the immunizations and those are routine immunizations anyway. They are certainly not going to have yellow fever, certainly not going to have Japanese encephalitis. So, then the doctor send somebody off to a pharmacy. Pharmacy doesn’t have them either and have people that aren’t necessarily comfortable with giving a vaccine that they are not really used to. You go to a pharmacy to get a rabies vaccine and they are going to look at you like you are kind of crazy.

So, what we have done is we have opened it up for not only travel vaccines but a lot of those vaccines. The pneumococcal vaccine, meningococcal vaccine and everything but we carry them all so the docs have somebody to send patients to.

Host: So, those are major benefits that the Travel Clinic has over the pharmacy or a family physician. So, you said you prefer seeing someone six to eight weeks before they leave. Is that so the vaccines have a chance to kick in before they leave?

Shari: Yes. Absolutely. So, you want to get it in and then get the antibodies up to a level that’s going to give you the immunity that you are looking for.

Host: I love it. So, how can people get in contact with the Travel Clinic at Pullman Regional Hospital?

Shari: Just call my number. It’s really easy. It’s 509-336-7354. Now, please leave a message because there is only me in this Travel Clinic and if I’m seeing patients, I can’t run back and that to the phone. But I definitely return phone calls every day and if I don’t get to you that day, it will be the next day. But usually if we get people in within a week, people are usually really surprised that wow. The thing I hear most is I didn’t know you were here, number one and this was so much easier. You have no idea how many phone calls I have made, and nobody has been able to help me until you. And then I access the whole immunization record through the state. I’m able to pull up and show right what the patients have had, what they need. We get them all updated. They get all their medications. We send them off. They are happy and most of them tell me, I am so much more comfortable with the whole travel situation now that I’ve talked to you.

Host: Well, it’s just smart travel to do that. I imagine there’s a lot of people that don’t. So, give Shari a call, 509-336-7354 before you go on that big international trip of yours and make sure you are protected. Shari, thank you so much for your time.

Shari: No problem. I’m always here.

Host: So give Shari a call or you can also visit www.pullmanregional.org, that’s www.pullmanregional.org. And if you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out our full podcast library for topics of interest to you. This is the Health Podcast from Pullman Regional. I’m Bill Klaproth. Thanks for listening.