Made a stop through the travel clinic.  This was to bring immunizations up to date and get prescription for malaria pills.  I ended up with shots for Yellow Fever, Meningitis and Rabies.  From past travels, I was already up to date on other immunizations TDA recommends (Hep A, Hep B, Typhoid, Polio, Tetanus) which is a good thing or else my arms would have been sore.

I will still need to be careful about water, mosquitoes and blood (and hopefully not too much blood) since there are diseases you can’t guard against or aren’t 100%. However, better safe than sorry on these things.

Most immunizations made sense, but there was one I briefly waffled on: rabies vaccine.  As I’ve read and learned – it seems that getting a pre-vaccine helps if you are bitten by a rabid animal, however one still needs to get the post-vaccine as well.  Hence, my logic was that if you need to evacuate to get help anyways and probability of getting bitten was very small, why not wait.

However, in the end I decided to go for rabies vaccine this time, mostly based on two factors: (1) it was in the TDA recommend list and (2) when cycling across Russia, I had the same choice.  Both Mickey and I opted not for the vaccine but in eastern Siberia Mickey was bitten by a dog in back of knee.  The wound was promptly cleaned and we even checked on the dog the next day.  In that case, she did end up getting the follow up vaccine on returning to Netherlands three weeks later.