Travel vaccinations
The Travel Clinic at HTD provides a specialist vaccination and vaccine advice service for tropical diseases such as rabies, dengue and yellow fever. The clinic specialist's can help travellers assess the safety, appropriateness, and timing of vaccinations they may need before a trip.
Please note visitors to the clinic are asked to provide a record of all your past immunisations, including both travel and childhood vaccines. This can help the staff assess which infections pose most of a risk. While many individuals are concerned about rare, exotic, and tropical infections, it can often be the case that more common infections such as measles pose the greatest threat.
Vaccines are one of a range of tools used by healthcare professionals to protect against infections. Vaccines generally work by introducing a changed form of, or part of an organism to the body to sensitise and train the immune system to prevent infection when it is exposed to the pathogen in the future.
There are different types of vaccines that can be broadly split into live and inactivated vaccines. It is important to ensure you have a safe and appropriate vaccine for you. You may find vaccines rarely work immediately, it can take up to six to eight weeks to develop a full immune response to vaccinations. To make sure that you are protected, it is important to leave enough time to complete these before you travel. Please note some vaccinations are a one-off dose offering long-term protection, others require courses given over weeks or months and others require frequent booster doses.
Precisely which vaccines should be taken when traveling to a country can change dependent on various factors. For information about individual vaccine schedules and country recommendations, please see. NaTHNaC - Topics in Brief (travelhealthpro.org.uk)
