Vaccinations

We’re off on a short trip to India next month.   To be honest, I’ve never had vaccinations specifically for travel purposes, but I got told very firmly by family members that I ought to have them for India.  I headed off to the GP, and despite me telling him that this was an “up-market” tour and we wouldn’t be off the beaten track, he strongly advised a number of precautions.   So I ended up with a couple of injections (which also included whooping cough, apparently regarded as essential in the presence of babies) plus a solution to be taken orally for cholera (two doses, taken at least a week apart).

You have to pay for all these, so the all-up cost – not including the consultation – was well over $300, including over $70 for each dose of the cholera vaccine.   I suppose oral vaccines have been around for a while.  In fact, if my memory serves me correctly, we may even have had a polio vaccine when I was a child that was taken orally.  And we were certainly made to drink “cough medicine”.   Be that as it may, it felt a little unusual to mix up an effervescent solution to which is added the vaccine, and then drink it.

The instructions state that the vaccine results in an 85% chance of protection for 6 months, decreasing to 52% at the end of the 2nd year.   Just the same, I won’t be drinking the water!