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.