Trip preparations: Immunizations

Thailand and India are two of the world's biggest destinations in terms of medical tourism. Both countries are rather well developed in terms of medical facilities (often comparable to Western countries) and have doctors fairly competent in English without being too expensive. Especially if you're coming from an expensive area like the US or sometimes even Europe or Japan, these countries offer a viable alternative for routine procedures and even some more complicated procedures.

As I alluded to in our last episode, our destination for the last couple days has been the snake farm at the Queen Saovabha Memorial Institute in central Bangkok just north of Lumphini Park. As you may have guessed though, the snake farm wasn't what we were after—it was more about the immunizations.

Queen Saovabha Memorial Institute

Immunizations are an important step in preparation for any long trip, but the shots can get pricey, especially in Japan. Japan only seems to offer vaccinations for diseases which occur locally, meaning most vaccines for things like typhoid and yellow fever have to be imported. After checking others' experiences, it appears that the shots we wanted to take would be about 70,000 yen in Japan; we got the same done in Thailand for just 5,205 Baht (roughly 13,000 yen), less than 20% of the Japanese cost. Here's the price comparison breakdown:

Exchange rate: 1 JPY = 2.484 THB

	Japan (JPY)	Thailand (THB)	Thailand (JPY)
Hepatitis A	8,400	1,400	3,478
Yellow fever	7,700	900	2,236
Typhoid	11,550	305	758
Pertussis/tetanus/ polio/ diphtheria	6,400	700	1,739
meningitis/ Meningococcal	14,000	1,200	2,981
Measles, mumps, rhubella	13,650	250	621
Japanese encephalitis	7350	450	1,118
Totals	69,050	5,205	12,930

First three of our shots

Now some vaccines are supposed to be administered in 2-3 shots spaced a few weeks or months apart for full effect, which is why most doctors will recommend you start getting shots a month or two before leaving. Given the price differences, however, we tried researching how long the first shot would carry us. The hepatitis A vaccine recommends a booster 6-12 months after the first shot, so it should last about the length of our trip. The only other shot we got that requires a second jab is Japanese encephalitis, and honestly you can probably skip that one. After the fact, we looked this up online and found that it is really only a high risk disease if you plan to be in rural areas of SE Asia, which we do not.

That leads to the question: how do you decide which immunizations to get? In addition to the above, doctors will often mention hepatitis B and rabies shots. As a married couple, we're not to concerned about hepatitis B. As for rabies, and getting the vaccination doesn't prevent you from going to the hospital if you get bit; it only gives you more time to get there before things get ugly. In general, CDC and WHO are great resources for researching immunizations and other health issues.

Akemi wearing her mini badges
of honor like a boss

If you decide to do like we did and get your shots on the road, I'd recommend taking it easy for a day or two. Both of our arms are as sore as a virgin on prom night, and we sacked out for a few hours after getting back from the clinic today. I'm thinking tomorrow will be a good day to take it easy and catch up on a bit of work that's trickled in.

Also note that the clinic will only let you get four shots in one visit. We wound up breaking our shots up over two days. Honestly, given how I feel right now, I don't know if I'd want to take seven jabs at once. Ouch!

Lastly, either show up early or just wait until 1 pm. We got to have lunch there just to wait for them to open back up.

Snake farm behind the vaccination center

So where does the snake farm part come in? There's a snake farm out back that you can check out for 200 Baht a head. We didn't bother, but a bunch of people seem to find it pretty interesting. I guess we're just cheap. ;)



Now malaria is a totally different subject, but I'll leave that one for another time.