Health problems awareness during travel among faculty members of a large university in Latin America: preliminary report Preocupação com problemas de saúde durante viagens em professores de uma grande universidade na América Latina: descrição preliminar

• Main Authors: Ana Cristina Nakamura Tome, Thaís Brandi Canello, Expedito José de Albuquerque Luna, Heitor Franco de Andrade Junior
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade de São Paulo (USP) 2013
• Subjects: Travel; Traveler's diseases; Epidemiology; Faculty member; Brazil; Arctic medicine. Tropical medicine; RC955-962; Infectious and parasitic diseases; RC109-216; Arctic
• Online Access: https://doaj.org/article/4cba30c974b34a9e95dcf70dc777bf7b

Health safety during trips is based on previous counseling, vaccination and prevention of infections, previous diseases or specific problems related to the destination. Our aim was to assess two aspects, incidence of health problems related to travel and the traveler's awareness of health safety. To this end we phone-interviewed faculty members of a large public University, randomly selected from humanities, engineering and health schools. Out of 520 attempts, we were able to contact 67 (12.9%) and 46 (68.6%) agreed to participate in the study. There was a large male proportion (37/44, 84.1%), mature adults mostly in their forties and fifties (32/44, 72.7%), all of them with higher education, as you would expect of faculty members. Most described themselves as being sedentary or as taking occasional exercise, with only 15.9% (7/44) taking regular exercise. Preexisting diseases were reported by 15 travelers. Most trips lasted usually one week or less. Duration of the travel was related to the destination, with (12h) or longer trips being taken by 68.2% (30/44) of travelers, and the others taking shorter (3h) domestic trips. Most travelling was made by air (41/44) and only 31.8% (14/44) of the trips were motivated by leisure. Field research trips were not reported. Specific health counseling previous to travel was reported only by two (4.5%). Twenty seven of them (61.4%) reported updated immunization, but 11/30 reported unchecked immunizations. 30% (9/30) reported travel without any health insurance coverage. As a whole group, 6 (13.6%) travelers reported at least one health problem attributed to the trip. All of them were males travelling abroad. Five presented respiratory infections, such as influenza and common cold, one neurological, one orthopedic, one social and one hypertension. There were no gender differences regarding age groups, destination, type of transport, previous health counseling, leisure travel motivation or pre-existing diseases. Interestingly, the two cases of previous health counseling were ...