Say No To Cujo

Part of our preparation is to get a whole bunch of vaccinations. The majority of these can be obtained from your local doctor’s surgery either free or at a minimal cost. So we’ve visited the doctor’s a number of times over the last couple of month to get the following jabs:

Hepatitis A and B
Typhoid
Tetanus
Polio
Diptheria

However these left us with two major vaccinations to get done. The first is Yellow Fever which is a requirement to enter many countries and is a pretty expensive one.

The Second is Rabies. The Rabies jab doesn’t stop you getting rabies and in fact only gives you until symptoms appear to get treated after an infected animal bites you. Fail to do this and once symptoms of the disease appear you’re a gonner. In fact only six people have ever survived after presenting symptoms and of these only 1 didn’t receive any treatment before or after. So basically without treatment you die. The symptoms appear between two to twelve weeks after exposure and then death occurs within 2 to 10 days. The advantage of the vaccination is that it means that post-exposure you have to have less treatment and the cost of this treatment is much lower.

There are two different forms of the vaccination both of which require 3 doses over a month. One is much cheaper than the other and only gives cover for a year but then can take a booster or the more expensive one gives longer cover. Most people opt for the cheap version.

We have chosen to go to a travel clinic for these two immunisations called 1st Contact purely on the basis of price. They charge £20 per Rabies dose and £50 for the Yellow Fever jab. They are also based close to our work in London. The process was quick and easy and only took about 15 minutes for both of us, although the customer care wasn’t brilliant and the surroundings were a bit dodgy. But for the cheapest prices in town we can live with it.