On August 21, 2024 it will be 65 years since Hawaii became the 50th state in the United States. Located over 5 hours away from the US mainland by plane, it’s a state that differs greatly form the other states that hoist the Star Spangled Banner. With its own climate, culture and identity, it’s perfectly possible that it has its own specific health situation as well. So why, when you try to search for recommendations for vaccinations for Hawaii, do you end up on an NHS-associated page that is talking just about the USA as a whole?
Yes, Hawaii is part of the USA, but the USA spans 3,796,742 square miles. Some locations in the USA, even leaving Hawaii out of it, are more than 2800 miles apart. Why is the health advice on offer not more specific than country level?
This is the question that Pinpoint Travel Health asked itself during the years in which we were developing and fine-tuning our cutting-edge travel health advice system. Having a broad brushstroke approach to travel health just does not work in a world where disease distribution is becoming more complex and now, increasingly, impacted by climate change and the enhanced ability for people to skip across the globe on leisure and business trips.
New diseases that were once associated only with the most tropical countries are now taking hold in Europe, although often in ‘pockets’. Having a country-wide briefing is just not specific enough and not the best means of protecting those individuals who have to travel for work or who are opting for travel for adventures and trips of a lifetime.
Pinpoint Travel Health’s approach
Our aim was to change this by delivering pinpoint precision to travel planning, right down to the level of a village, hotel or conference centre. We wanted to empower anyone who is intending to travel the world and equip them with more intelligence than anything available on an NHS or Government operated website.
There are other good reasons for this. If you follow the country-wide advice available, you are likely to do one of two things. On the one hand, you could ignore the advice to have a vaccinations or take antimalarials, because the advice is not set in stone and merely ‘recommended’ or something that you could ‘consider’.
On the other hand, you could opt for expensive vaccinations that you actually do not require, because the location to which you are travelling is not one in which the risk of a particular disease is actually present. Various tropical diseases are only found within one part of a country, not its entire span. The ‘country’ focused advice does not flag that up.
The pitfalls of not having precision in travel health planning
If you are a business, paying for vaccinations for employees, you could be paying unnecessarily. The same is true if you are a family, having to pay fairly hefty charges for vaccinations for all members. It can certainly tot up and add to the cost of your trip, taking expenditure way beyond what you had intended – and all for no good reason.
The travel health advice websites that do not offer pinpoint location guidance, also fail to look at other key elements within the world of travel health. One is the seasonality of some diseases. If you are only travelling in one season and one in which the disease risk is never present, you really do not need to be paying for a vaccine.
On the other hand, they do not offer you any idea of whether or not current medications will cause an issue, if or when you have a vaccine. They simply suggest you go to a medical professional for this advice.
That’s fine but that medical professional then has to wade through their reference sources, trying to ascertain what the situation might be. It eats into their time. It swallows up your time and, if it’s an NHS facility, it takes away other patients’ time.
How Pinpoint Travel Health saves clinics and individuals valuable time
With Pinpoint Travel Health, all of this pain is taken out of the equation. The traveller simply uploads their details and those of their trip and the intelligent software does all of the hard work, utilising the thousands of different combinations of outcomes that it contains, thanks to the vast amount of data held. Within minutes, it produces a report that is specific to the traveller, their health, their age, their intended trip location, itinerary and activities and their potential work duties, if volunteering or working abroad.
So, if you are travelling to Hawaii, to go back to our example, you do not receive generic advice for the USA. If you are someone who is not that keen on vaccination, you are not going to be put through the ordeal unless it is absolutely necessary. If you are on a gap year budget, you are not going to be blowing a lot of it on travel health vaccinations that are not required.
On the other hand, you will be advised of those that you absolutely should book, if you want to avoid falling seriously ill, invalidating your travel insurance or being refused entry into a particular country on arrival at the border.
The low cost of getting travel health planning right
All of this comes at a cost of just £15 and VAT is included within that so, if you are a business, you can claim that back. With your Travel Health Brief in hand, you can make the life of your doctor or pharmacist so much easier, whilst, as an employer, you can categorically know that you have fulfilled your duty of care to a travelling employee in the most careful way possible.
Remember the Hawaii example when planning travel vaccines. It should show you that saying ‘aloha’ to Pinpoint Travel Health is the only logical thing to do, when planning your vaccinations and antimalarials.