Tropical Diseases and Travel Health

In recent years there has been an exponential rise in overseas travel, either as part of school organised trips or undertaken as a gap year before university. Young people today have far greater access to more and more locations across the globe.

In this talk Dr Easmon will look at several aspects of risk to health while travelling abroad, both non-infectious risks such as accidents; pollution; jet-lag or natural disasters as well as infectious disease risks including malaria; typhoid; ebola and rabies.

He will highlight 7 key steps to protecting yourself against disease related travel including information on vaccinations; reducing bites from mosquitoes; and awareness of clean water sources. In addition he will give pupils an overview of disease epidemiology related to travel.

Dr Easmon trained at St George’s Hospital, London. He did his elective in Ghana (his country of birth) and has since worked with, among others, Merlin, Raleigh International and Save the Children in Rwanda, and ECHO in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan.

With the Foreign Office he has visited Egypt, Israel, Tunisia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. In 2009 he re-visited Rwanda and has since done medicals or given talks in the Congo, Botswana and Mozambique.

His expertise in travel medicine and public health was through medical evacuations, working abroad and stints at the Hospital for Tropical Disease’s travel clinic. He enjoyed several years on the board of the British Travel Health Association and is one of the few UK medical practitioners to have obtained the International Certificate in Travel Health from the International Society of Travel Health. In 2008 Charlie became a member of the new Faculty of Travel Medicine – MFTM RCPS (Glasg).