Medical musings

We need to book our jabs soon, which means deciding which to have. We paid £3.50 for an online "Health Check" from MASTA - good value for detailed notes about each country we're visiting, malaria maps and recommendations of particular drugs. Some immunisations seem clearly a good idea: Tetanus vaccine has few side-effects and catching Tetanus would be a great thing to not have to worry about while in rural Kenya. Yellow Fever is legally necessary. Some are clearly less of a good idea - Cholera vaccine has fairly common serious side effects and isn't very effective. But that leaves the ones that are less clear-cut to decide about: Typhoid (maybe we'll be fine if we stick with good hygeine..), Hepatitis A (ditto, and it's rarely severe in children), TB (usually caught through prolonged household exposure with an infected person). Some would be boosters, some new; some with some worrying side-effect risks, some with quite low chances of catching the disease anyway: and we're not keen on giving our immune systems loads of new stresses (from any unnecessary vaccines) just before they have to cope with loads of other new stresses. Malaria: We reckon we'll have to take malaria pills for five months - and this means that we should definitely go to Cambodia (malarial) before Thailand (most areas not malarial) rather than the other way round, so we can come off the drugs after February. This many pills will cost a bit, and be a little pile to carry - if anyone knows if it's safe and cheap to buy malaria prophylactics in the developing world, please let us know! - Mark