Vaccinations
Vaccination is often one of the forgotten items for people not used to traveling beyond western countries. Luckily, there are some easy steps you can follow to protect your family while traveling. Be forewarned, however — Some vaccines and pills aren’t cheap, and you may have to make some trade-off decisions on which ones you want to skip on. Be sure to start this process early, as it may take time to schedule an appointment with the travel clinics near you, and some vaccines may require multiple visits.
The first step, after determining your destinations, is to visit the CDC website that lists all the vaccinations needed by country:
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/destinations/list
Next, find a travel clinic near you and get their vaccine price list. You can just do a google search for “travel clinics near me” as a starting point. Read reviews on these clinics, but chances are they’re all similar and you may not have many options near you. Once you see the price list, take a deep breath and highlight the ones that apply to you and are expensive. If you get every vaccine and pills recommended on the CDC sight, you could spend over a thousand dollars per person before you even set foot out the door. Read up on the true necessity of vaccines and decide for yourself whether each shot is worth the cost. For example, you may decide to just stay away from animals instead of paying for tetanus shots. Also, for large countries like India and Brazil, you may want to see which diseases are more prominent in the areas you’re visiting, instead of getting all the vaccination for the whole country.
Lastly, go to the travel clinic. You will first go through a consultation where they explain to you which vaccines you need. You will already have some information at this time, so weigh their information against your research and get the appropriate shots.
One last thing to note — Bring your vaccination card and get them updated. Hopefully you already have a good record of your shots, as it’ll show which ones you already had and can save you the cost and pain of unnecessary shots.