Traveling often goes hand-in-hand with being a competitive athlete. Whether it’s a professional football player or an endurance runner, traveling before competition and, in some cases, traveling in general, can decrease athletic performance and expose the athlete to health risks. In this two-part series, I’ll address these specific threats: jet lag and deep vein thrombosis (DVT). We all know about,…
Physicians in practice for many years will tell you that upon hearing a diagnosis, the first question that many patients ask is: “Is it serious?” In fact, most people do not really care about what their illness is called, so long as they can expect a quick and total recovery. This is also true for travelers who fall sick or…
Travelers who end up with a cold after taking a flight frequently believe that the air on the plane is to blame for their sickness. According to a recent MSNBC article, however, the real culprit is fellow passengers who are already sick and spread their germs through coughing and sneezing on board. In reality, the air on an airplane is…
Travelers to remote locations with limited or no options for professional medical care often have access to the Internet and thus the ability to seek out web-based tools to diagnose conditions and recommend medical triage. Even those in the comfort of their own homes have made free self-help symptom checkers a popular pastime on the web. How useful are they?…
Head injuries on the ski slopes have decreased due to the increased use of helmets and improved equipment, and the sport could be made even safer if everyone used the equipment properly. In the 2009-10 season, a total of 25 skiers and 13 snowboarders died in a span of 59.8 million skier/snowboarder days, making the sport relatively safe—after all, 46…
Beach season may be drawing to a close in the Northern Hemisphere, but it’s not too late to get a really nasty sunburn, especially if you’re traveling to a high-altitude area. A study conducted by the Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology at the New York University School of Medicine suggests an approximate 8 to 10 percent increase in ultraviolet…
Mononucleosis—better known as “mono” or “kissing disease”—is a common viral illness that afflicts thousands of young adults each year. Although usually a benign condition, with symptoms of fever, headache, sore throat, fatigue and swollen lymph nodes—particularly in the neck—mononucleosis can occasionally lead to much more severe problems, and rarely even death, particularly in those with compromised immune systems such as…
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…
One of our previous posts speculated that tolerance may be key to health and happiness based on a comparative study of states in the U.S. That line of thinking prompted us to look for comparative data worldwide. We came up with the Global Gender Gap Report, released in 2008 by the World Economic Forum, which rates countries on the disparity…
Earlier this month, we posted about Russia’s heavy alcohol consumption levels as a follow up to our Healthy Planet Index. It turns out that Russians may be what Alex De Jonge has called “geoalcoholics” in his book “Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union.” This discovery all stemmed (no pun intended) from a link that Tyler Cowan posted on…
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