Staying Healthy Abroad: A Global Traveler’s Guide

If you are planning on a foreign trip and read Staying Healthy Abroad, you may cancel your trip. The health dangers waiting for you in underdeveloped countries are scary and in formidable numbers. Christopher Sanford did excellent research on the subject and wrote this rather extensive volume. For the average reader, it’s way too much information; would anyone want to read twenty pages on malaria or seventeen on diarrhea? A short chapter-by-chapter summary may have been the answer to improve this book.

When you get to the chapter on diseases for which no vaccine is available, you may seriously think about canceling your trip. Each chapter starts with a thorough discussion of a disease, then ends with a number of short Q&As. Once Sanford is through discussing the more common diseases and problems, he gets into the specifics of traveling as a man, woman, child, or LGBTQ person, with a chapter on each. At the end of the book, we arrive at fillers: statistics on road fatalities and such tables as air quality in different countries. Among the other dangers are volcanic gas emanations that may kill you while hiking on an active volcano.