USA - Trypanosomiasis

I must say that preparing for health coverage and immunization for international travel is no picnic. It is literally a pain and it resulted in several days of painful research and a one-day bout of fever for both of us.. you might ask us how we got the fever.. well, read on…

We have an innocent-looking line written on our travel to-do list – it says “healthcare”. Well, as we have discovered since that simple line was written several weeks ago, healthcare is a nightmare and the devil is in the details (as you can see, I’m mixing metaphors liberally).

Given that we’re leaving our jobs, we need to find reasonable healthcare coverage – after searching on the net and looking at the several healthcare provider websites, I finally picked one of them and got us signed up. So far so good.

Nevertheless, it turns out that most healthcare plans do not cover normal health needs (such as prescription drugs or doctors visits) once you step outside the US. In fact, in some cases, coverage drops to ER visits only once you step outside the state of California. In fact, if you ask the agent on the phone, they’ll go to an extreme to describe exactly what types of emergency events are covered under their plans. Wonderful.

So our travel agent signed us up for international health coverage – this covers things like “emergency evacuation” which means (god forbid!) that if something happens anywhere abroad, we can get airlifted back to a US hospital (if local hospitals are not up to the mark) and the coverage plan pays for it. I'm really feeling good about this now...

So then I turned to the problem of getting immunized against the teaming hordes of diseases that roam the earth. I went to the website of the Center for Disease Control (CDC). One can pick from a list of different regions of the world… at that point, the goods news starts arriving in droves. Within the space of a few paragraphs, we see a profusion of wonderful terms, such as e. coli, cholera, parasites, typhoid, toxoplasmosis, hepatitis, malaria, diarrhea, vomiting, yellow fever, dengue, leishmaniasis, and onchocerciasis. If I actually believed I’d get all these diseases, I would never even step outside my home in the morning.

But two so-called diseases take the prize for scariness… one is called “filariasis” … fill-with-what-itis? The second one is trypanosomiasis (known to the average person as sleeping sickness) which has been reported in Darfur, Sudan. The good news is that we’re not planning to be anywhere near Darfur anytime soon…my palm pilot doesn’t have any anti-janjaweed software yet.

Being short of time, I picked what sounded like the more commonly-occuring diseases and both of us checked our immunization records to see if we were immunized. It turns out that we both had to get a few more immunization shots. I then called my healthcare provider and asked them where I could go to get these shots. The answer was a resounding “no.” No? What does that mean? It means that doctors & clinics get reimbursed only upto 80% of what they pay to procure the shots – so this means that these doctors are not receptive toward being asked to provide immunization shots. Anyway, so now I’m calling around trying to find some solution. Finally, UCSF referred us to the Overseas Medical Center in San Francisco.

So off we went to the Overseas Medical Center yesterday. After paying muchos dineros, we got our shots. The only interesting parts about that foray was that our doctor had climbed Kilimanjaro in ’75 and said it was a piece of cake. He was also in neighbouring Kenya when Kenya got its independence… in his terms – “I saw the Kenyan flag go up and the British flag come down..” He also informed us that our anti-malaria pills will perhaps cause us to have hallucinations and nightmares... if we're not having enough fun travelling, we'll definitely be having lots of fun with the hallucinations ;-)

Which brings us back to fever. As we had yellow fever immunization shots, we both got a slight fever yesterday. Not to worry. The fever was quickly dispatched with a couple of Tylenols.

That’s it for now. We promise to write more upbeat blogs in the future... :-)
-dev

Comments

[Ami Parekh]

Sounds like a bit of a rough start. Hopefully you won't need any medical treatment while you're abroad. If you do, at least you have the piece of mind that you're covered! It's refreshing to hear the details instead of the one-liner that says our vacation was great! I look forward to more blog updates!!

[Lini]

Wow! That was something. So you have had a lick of yellow fever already! Frightening. Glad you are well though. Filaria is elephantiasis, ie some limb or the other looks like an elephant's trunk with warts!!! Sorry about that.

All will be well is my forecast.

Mama