Remember Yellow Fever?

This week's Camino a Ítaca looks back to when I first started traveling. Remember those Yellow Fever passorts they used to give out? I imagine they still do? Looking back and looking forward. You can click over and read the original article in Spanish en el Hoy, or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

If memory serves me correct, it was a little yellow booklet. Similar in size to those that banks used to give out when you opened an account with them. I used to carry it in the same ‘secret’ place with my passport when I travelled, which now that I think about it really wasn’t so secret at all. The first time I got one, I was so excited. Each little stamp that I got meant that I was one step closer to experiencing places I had only dreamt about. Each needle I had to endure meant that I was about to get on a plane to somewhere seriously ‘exotic’.

I think the first one that I got was for Yellow Fever. Then I remember there was one for Hepatitis A and another for Hepatitis B, but there was also talk about one that was going to be released that combined them both and maybe even added Hepatitis C. I think there was one for typhoid and I may have even got one for Japanese encephalitis. For me, I couldn’t have cared less. I’d go to the infectious disease specialist, we would look at a wonderful world map and I would tell her where I was going. She would then tell me what I needed and if there was a chance of malaria, dengue and diseases like this that weren’t covered by vaccines. That was it, end of story.

I think that the only time that I had a healthcare professional tell me that it was up to me to decide was when there was an experimental cholera pill that had come out, but as I wasn’t planning on visiting an area that had experienced a recent outbreak, it wasn’t necessary and she said it was up to me if I wanted to spend the money on it. It would have never occurred to me to ask which pharmaceutical company produced the vaccine. I simply knew that I was used to the sunburnt red color that I always turn in tropical countries and that I wasn’t particularly anxious to turn yellow with some terrible fever and got the needle, case closed.

This was long before the advent of Facebook and the millions of homegrown specialists that now spread their idiocy across the world at the click of a button. Illuminati that have emerged from their parents’ basements, convinced that Bill Gates was somehow going to implant them with a tracking device that was more powerful than the one they text on and carry in their pockets everywhere they go.

Of course people who are vaccinated are going to catch the virus, some may even get sick and a few may even die. This is what statistically happens when you are talking about vaccinating an entire planet. These aren’t the numbers that your cousin found on a blog and insists are true, these are empirical facts. Vaccinated people suffer a lot less from the illness, period.

I’m desperate to get on a plane again, to feel that sensation and excitement I have always felt when traveling to somewhere new. If it means one, two or even three shots, bring it on.