Andrew Orr, Jr. serves as a Special Projects Director. Andy is responsible for taking the product development lead for certain large products being launched, including HTH Mobile and HTH Appointment Scheduling. Andy has an extensive entrepreneurial and technical background. He has served as HTH IT Director in the past as well as president of a number of entrepreneurial businesses. Andy earned his Master of Business Administration from the Darden School at the University of Virginia and his Bachelor of Science degree from Yale University.
As a follow up to Mike’s post earlier this month on The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, Sonia Shah’s recent book on malaria, we noticed that the Freakonomics blog will pass your questions onto Shah and post her answers.
I once had a question on copyright law answered by Laurence Tribe in this way. It is very cool to get this sort of personal response, so check it out at Battling Malaria: Bring Your Questions for Sonia Shah.
CNBC recently ran a piece about counterfeit products in the marketplace highlighting the growing problem of counterfeit medicines. While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recognizes that counterfeits threaten the safe drug supply in the United States (see the FDA’s Counterfeit Medicine web page), the problem is even more acute outside the U.S. and other countries where medications are highly regulated. International travelers need to be more and more vigilant about how they purchase medicine abroad.
The World Health Organization has addressed this global issue by the formation in 2006 of a global taskforce called IMPACT (International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce). As IMPACT’s web site points out, “Counterfeiting is greatest in regions where regulatory and enforcement systems for medicines are weakest.” Specifically, most industrialized countries are relatively safe, but the risks are greater “in many African countries, and in parts of Asia, Latin America, and countries in transition.” Of course, counterfeits are well represented among medicines ordered over the Internet. Many online sources (this seems fairly obvious to me) are not playing by all the rules and are more likely to be selling fakes.
The counterfeiters seem to be medication agnostic. Nothing is safe. If you have to get new medicine while away from home, it makes sense to go to a trusted pharmacy or doctor. An international medical assistance company may be able to help you. HTH Worldwide (which sponsors this blog) equips its customers with the names of carefully selected doctors and notable pharmacies in hundreds of destinations around the world. No matter how you make your purchase, inspect the packaging carefully. Unfortunately, counterfeiters have become extremely sophisticated; most of the time, a visual inspection will only detect an obvious problem. In response, the drug industry is working on anti-counterfeit measures employing high technology. New Scientist magazine has detailed some of the countermeasures that are being developed to fight fake drugs (subscription required to see the whole article). The time is coming when each pill can be tracked and validated by the consumer prior to use.
We’ve all encountered knockoffs from gregarious sidewalk vendors hawking convincing copies. (Quick aside: I once had a potentially embarrassing conversation with a street vendor of handbags in New York City. He was from Senegal, and I asked him if he lived near Dhaka. World capitals gone awry – Dhaka is the capital of Bangladesh! He heard “Dakar” and thought I really knew my way around West Africa). Counterfeit handbags may pose some risks (not colorfast?), but nothing like taking, literally, a poison pill. Make sure the medicine you are taking comes from a trusted source.
While Bastille Day is a decidedly French holiday, it is celebrated in many parts of the world. According to Wikipedia, Belgium, Hungary, South Africa and the UK all have events scheduled.
Here in the United States, over 50 cities participate, and one can even see them listed on an interactive Bastille Day map. My favorite, not to be too parochial, is the Eastern State Penitentiary Bastille Day Festival which took place last weekend. A reenactment of the storming of the Bastille takes place with “dozens of French revolutionaries” playing their roles to the tee including dragging Marie Antoinette to the guillotine. Of course, no one said it was historically accurate – for those of you a little short on your French history, the storming of the Bastille took place in 1789. Louis XVI lost his head in January of 1793, but Marie kept it all together until October.
Eastern State Penitentiary and the Fairmount area of Philadelphia make a great backdrop for the celebration which ends with special French meals in the many local restaurants and bars.
Do you have any Bastille Day stories for us or unique, local ways it is celebrated in your neck of the woods? We would love to hear about it, and, of course, stay safe and healthy while you are out “storming” – avoid too much cake and let the professionals handle the fireworks.
Photo by Ammar Abd Rabbo.
In today’s New York Times’ Globespotters post, Fresh, Sweet and Seasonal in Mumbai, Dan Packel tells us about the abundance of fresh fruit available in the APMC Fruit Market in Navi Mumbai. It covers a huge, 22-acre area and sounds delicious. Not to rain on Dan’s parade, but I did think we should remind travelers of dangers sometimes associated with food when traveling.
According to the CDC, “Traveler’s diarrhea (TD) is the most predictable travel-related illness.” It hits 30% to 70% of travelers, depending on the destination. We have covered this subject before, so we don’t need to rehash all of the same information (see Eating Safely: What can I do? and Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One: Where I Met Montezuma); I will stick to fruits and a weird English anomaly.
Simply put, it is better to eat fruit that can be peeled and that you have peeled yourself. Obviously, wash your hands and the fruit prior to peeling. This leads me to my English anomaly: what does unpeeled mean? Is this fruit that has been peeled, as in “undressed,” or is it yet-to-be peeled. The CDC makes a very ambiguous statement in its guide on TD – ”Other risky foods include raw or undercooked meat and seafood, and unpeeled raw fruits and vegetables.” If it is risky, I assume they mean “peeled.”
Photo by gruntzooki
Fees for U.S. Passports increase substantially in less than a week. Currently, adult fees for the standard Passport Book are $100 for a new one and $75 for renewals. These fees rise to $135 and $110, respectively. For children the increases are also large. Current fees are $85 for new passports or renewals; this will go up to $105.
Some other fees are also going up or are being charged for the first time – additional pages for your book used to be free but are now $82, and the file search fee has gone up from $60 to $150. The file search is required when an applicant is unable to present proof of citizenship.
All of the details can be found at the U.S. Department of State’s web site – new fees and current rates.
We put together a simple chart to highlight the changes (see below).
The State Department’s main page for passports can answer all of your questions about passports – when you need one, how to get one fast, what to do when you lose one, etc. Get prepared for your next fun, international trip and save some money by doing it this week!
I have previously posted about fitness and health apps available for the iPhone and other smart phones (see Staying Fit while Traveling – iPhone apps and more…) as well as some of the devices available for tracking your fitness activities like Fitbit Tracker (see Staying Fit While Traveling [Redux] – Fitbit Tracker Ships Soon).
On the phone side, one of the biggest limitations for the iPhone was its inability to multitask which can obviously cause problems when trying to run a fitness app that needs to be on all the time. With the advent of iOS4, Apple’s new operating system for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad (to be released in the fall), Apple has caught up with other mobile platforms that have had multitasking running in various guises for a while. Whether it is the Android OS, Palm’s webOS, Windows Mobile or the BlackBerry OS, all of these devices have some sort of multitasking capabilities. Apple has taken a decidedly conservative approach to this and only allows apps to save their state or run some limited types of processes in the background. While many see this as not true multitasking when compared to Android or the Palm OS (for those interested, here is a short article on multitasking from PC World that compares iOS and Android), others think it may make a lot of sense, especially in devices with limited processing power and battery capacity. In fact, I believe the next version of Windows Mobile (the current version 6.5 is to be redubbed Windows Phone Classic), Windows Phone 7, will incorporate a multitasking model that is similar to Apple’s iOS4.
To keep our readers up to date on the latest technologies, I decided to search the App store and let you know which fitness apps now take advantage of iOS4’s new multitasking capabilities. Here are the ones I found:
It doesn’t look like Trailguru or MapMyFitness has released new versions of their apps to take advantage of multitasking. It would be great if fitness aficionados could chime in here with their reviews of these apps and also let us know about others they found that support multitasking. We could keep an updated list posted here for future reference.
Also, while I have your attention, it looks like the Fitbit Tracker is now shipping with only a little backlog – it must be doing well!
Photo by scriptingnews
As we start thinking about summer vacation plans (ok, I am a little behind schedule here), I thought it might be helpful to post some links to a couple of interesting articles I read recently.
The first introduced me to the word “mancation,” a term that is new to me, but supposedly coined back in 2002. My first reaction to the Wall Street Journal article, Guys Just Want to Have Fun, by Sue Shellenbarger, was wondering how many people could actually take an eight-week long cross-country cycling trip and then, what do these people do for a living.
In addition to the normal golfing and fishing trips, the column focused on the more extreme activities that men sometimes pursue – things like simulated dog-fighting in vintage airplanes or shark-diving expeditions. Here at the Healthy Travel Blog we often write about the risks that travelers may encounter during standard vacations. But mancations offer a whole new realm of danger and risk. What are travelers doing to take precautions against possibly bad outcomes? More preparation, better knowledge of nearby medical facilities and a more cautious, conservative approach to post-injury care may mean the difference between life and death. As a person who used to take much greater physical risks, I think that in some cases it was only luck that saved me from more disastrous results. My takeaway was this: have fun, know your limits and be prepared.
And now for something completely different, as they used to say on Monty Python’s Flying Circus (although originally used by Christopher Trace on the BBC children’s program, Blue Peter): the second article that caught my eye was not news to me but was a reminder and a good summary of the steps that one can take to economically stay in touch when traveling internationally. In Tips for Using Your Cellphone Abroad, Jennifer Saranow Schultz of the New York Times helps travelers navigate the confusing world of wireless carriers.
Let us know about your mancations, or even your gender-agnostic extreme vacations and also about your experiences with using your cell phone internationally. For an extra bonus, tell me how these two articles are connected. Hint: the answer is in the prior sentence.
Photo by g-na.
I am happy to report that our week at sea was uneventful from a health standpoint. Even though there were over 3,000 passengers (including 884 children), I didn’t see anyone that looked sick or on the verge of getting sick. A few passengers sported the scopolamine patch behind their ears, but I felt no need to take any medication or Vitamin B6 (that I dutifully packed for the trip).
There were some medical questions for the passengers when checking in, and if you said yes to having had a cough or other symptom in the past week, you were required to see their medical staff upon boarding. There was also a Purell® station at the entrance to each dining room or eating area, and many passengers were using this. These measures may have helped or we might have been lucky, but I would not avoid a cruise because of health concerns. I would, however, still check the outbreak list when planning your next cruise and take precautions just in case.
Back in November, I posted about our first iPhone app, mPassport Paris, and I am happy to announce that we now have an additional seventeen (17) available in the store. The new destinations are (grouped somewhat geographically):
Next week, Rome and Florence should also go live. The old post sums up the apps well, and we have made many improvements since then. All will soon be iPad compatible, and (drum roll please) all are free for now. So don’t wait to get one or more of these on your phone.
Finally, the mPassport tools and services are available on a worldwide basis through a subscription. This gives you access through mobile and desktop web sites that should work on any device. Learn more about this at http://www.mpassport.com/entry_basicInfo.cfm.
We would love to hear about your experiences using mPassport so get out there and get sick (ok, just play with it and tell us what you think).
Two stories concerning mosquitoes caught my attention recently. In the age-old “bad news, good news” tradition, it goes like this:
“The bad news is that if you drink beer, mosquitoes are more attracted to you and may bite you and give you malaria. The good news is that scientists have developed a mosquito that could, in theory, vaccinate you against malaria with each bite.”
The first study, Beer Consumption Increases Human Attractiveness to Malaria Mosquitoes, was conducted in Burkina Faso by a team of researchers led by Thierry Lefèvre from Emory University and published by PLoS ONE, an interactive open-access journal. It concluded that “beer consumption consistently increased volunteers’ attractiveness to mosquitoes.” The researchers believe that the alcohol in the local beer causes the increased attractiveness; however, further studies are necessary to eliminate other possibilities. I saw that the local beer is fairly low in alcohol content and wondered what the curve would look like as the strength varied. Is it a linear relationship, or would it yield an upside-down “U” shape? If the latter, one could stick to more toxic drinks (although this flies in the face of the researchers who also noted that alcohol consumption has other negative health effects and can lower one’s ability to defend against parasites and other threats to the immune system). I was lucky enough to learn about the African drink, dawa, from my wife (it was a huge hit on our wedding night). Dawa means “medicine” or “magical potion” in Swahili and is a much stronger drink than the local beer in Burkina Faso, so perhaps they already know about the shape of the curve.
The second study, Flying vaccinator; a transgenic mosquito delivers a Leishmania vaccine via blood feeding, was published in the April 2010 issue of Insect Molecular Biology and conducted by Associate Professor Shigeto Yoshida and his research team from Jichi Medical University. Unfortunately, there are ethical issues with using wild mosquitoes (are there domesticated ones?) to transmit a vaccine. How would the pharmas get paid for it, for example? Oh, yeah, that is not an ethical issue so much as an economical one. In all seriousness, it does sound like this idea may be years away if it ever gets off the ground (no pun intended). The mere fact that they did successfully use the mosquito’s saliva to deliver the payload, however, does hold promise for other therapies in the future.
Malaria is a very serious problem worldwide, affecting hundreds of millions of people each year and killing millions, mostly sub-Saharan children. If you took the time to read this, please think about helping to stop this disease and perhaps contributing to a worthy organization. It is money well spent. Also, if you are traveling to areas where malaria is a risk, learn about which preventive medicine is right for you and make sure that you take it.
