Take a quick look at these disease maps and notice how often East Africa appears in the High Risk areas. Be careful, though. People who look at them too long often draw their knees up to their chests and start rocking back and forth. Whimpering is also a common side effect.
Monica and I went to a local Passport Health clinic a few weeks ago to get inoculated against…well…against East Africa, apparently. Here are the vaccines in the "Highly Recommended" category for visitors to Tanzania:
- Hepatitis A
- Hepatitis B
- Tetanus/diphtheria/pertussis
- Influenza
- Tuberculosis
- Chicken Pox
- Rabies
- Measles/mumps/rubella
- Typhoid fever
- Yellow fever
Under the guidance of Ginger, our Pathogen Evasion Specialist (Trademarked!) at Passport Health, Monica and I made a series of weighty decisions about which inoculations to receive.
We also declined the yellow fever vaccine because it turns out that yellow fever isn’t actually a problem in Tanzania. In fact, Tanzania is one of just a handful of tropical nations in which yellow fever isn’t endemic at the moment, and their government wants to keep it that way. They do so by requiring proof of vaccination for anyone entering Tanzania from a country where yellow fever is present. So unless they give me and Mo' a hard time at the airport for our short layover in Ethiopia, we don’t need that inoculation. (USA! USA!)
Ginger stabbed us once in each arm. The first jab was for typhoid. One shot, done. Good for three years. The second injection was a vaccine called Twinrix, which covers us for both flavors of hepatitis (A and B). To get full protection, though, we had to go back the following week for another shot and then again, two weeks later, for a third.
Ginger's injections were painless. The faces we're making in the pics below were about the cost, not the discomfort. We each paid $100 for our typhoid jabs and -- brace yourself -- $200 for each of the three shots in the Hep A/B series. Ouch!
I'm just going to sit here and rock back a forth for a while. Pay me no mind.