Thursday, May 3, 2012

Stay healthy while traveling

The New York Times recently did an article on how to stay healthy while traveling:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/business/reducing-the-odds-of-getting-sick-on-a-trip.html?ref=health

In addition to the article here is what I do when traveling:

1) Airborn - Don't worry I do not believe it is the cure all that some people claim it is, but I figure it's better than nothing. I usually take one the day I am leaving and another the day I arrive followed by another my next full first day. I figure just giving my body some extra nutrients while it is tired and recovering can't hurt.

2)Re-hydration tablets: These are key when traveling anywhere you plan to eat food you would not normally eat. Sometimes you are just going to have trouble digesting the food, it wont necessarily ruin your whole trip (although it nearly did for my dad in Morocco but he also ate lettuce - silly boy). This will help you recover more quickly.

3) Anti-diarrhea medication: For the same reason as above, sometimes when enjoying delicious new cuisine your tummy just cannot handle it. This helps keep issues to a minimum. Also fun fact drugs like Imodium are water retaining drugs (to help you from getting too dehydrated when sick). When on safari my friends and I actually took them as a preventative measure - none of us dared venture outside our tent at night to the latrine 100 meters away, after all we might run into an elephant or hyena! So we took Imodium to help make sure that we did not wake up in the night to wee. Now I am not a doctor so I have no idea how bad this is for you medically but, it didn't kill us?

4) Hand sanitizing wipes: When in Ghana we only got one bucket of water a day which meant wanting to clean our hands and not necessarily being able to. Anti-bacterial hand gel is great when your hands are clean but when they are caked in dust and all sorts of other things you don't want on there, adding gel wont get it off so much as just roll it around (gross). With wipes you get texture and therefore you can get more dirt off!

What do you do to stay healthy while traveling?

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