Even if you're just a very occasional traveller, it's impossible to escape the happy fact that different countries are very different from each other. And if you're looking at buying international health insurance plans, providers such as AXA PPP International health insurance have country guides on their websites that give a brief summary of the health systems in various popular expatriate locations.
Over at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office website there's a very comprehensive set of information for people travelling abroad - and one of the things that is most interesting is the extent to which things vary - and that as health systems vary across the world, so do the health risks.
And you don't even have to travel all that far for things to be different from home. Take rabies for instance, which - although thankfully almost wiped out and as time goes on ever more increasingly rare - was always something that you were quite aware of when entering continental Europe through France when I was a kid. They had these big scary posters to warn people that smuggling pets could have very serious health consequences, and as a kid it all looks a bit scary - but of course that was just the authorities' poster campaign way of discouraging any behaviour that would spread the disease.
Then of course there are also diseases like malaria, which require prospective travellers to visit their doctor about two months before setting off, in order to ensure that all the relevant vaccinations or prescriptions are sorted.
On the whole though, it does seem that the further afield you travel the more different things get - so it definitely pays to do a bit ofresearch if you're going somewhere particularly remote and exotic.
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