With holiday vacations coming, anyone traveling overseas should contact their local municipal health department for advice on what precautions should be taken to decrease the possibility of contracting a communicable disease.
Mike Fitzpatrick, the Bloomfield health officer who also oversees Glen Ridge and Caldwell, said the susceptibility to communicable diseases during trips abroad is constantly evolving. So health precautions taken nine months ago may be outdated for the present.
“Before people travel abroad, they should look at the Center for Disease Control website,” he said in a telephone interview earlier this week. “Essentially, you have to be always looking at the hot spots in the country where you plan to travel.”
Within the three communities covered by the Bloomfield Department of Health, there are a few communicable diseases reported every month, he said.
One consideration for Fitzpatrick when a disease is reported is that Bloomfield, Caldwell and Glen Ridge all have institutions with a concentrated populations. Bloomfield and Caldwell have colleges, and Mountainside Hospital is located in Glen Ridge. Fitzpatrick said anyone admitted to the hospital as a patient with a communicable disease would be reported to the Bloomfield Department of Health as being within Glen Ridge since the hospital straddles that municipality and Montclair. According to Fitzpatrick, these institutions affect the rate for residents.
Within the communities under his watch, Fitzpatrick said there are currently cases of malaria, a case dengue fever and a considerable number of hepatitis cases.
“Investigations for communicable diseases are common,” he said. “We’re just looking for exponential growth.”
Just a little south on the Parkway, Robert Roe, the local health officer for Maplewood said he had been notified during the last several months of three cases of communicable diseases.
“A lot of people go to the Caribbean Islands,” Roe said in a recent telephone interview. “There is a fairly new disease there in the last year that I’ve never heard of before and it is spread by mosquito.”
Roe said it is called “chikungunya,” and to his knowledge, some 50,000 people have become ill from it.
“It causes pain in the muscles and joints,” he said. “We had one case in Maplewood. You feel sick for a week or two.”
There are about 50 diseases that a doctor or laboratory must report to state health officials, according to Roe. This data is passed to the health department of the municipality where the stricken person resides. Once the disease is reported, Roe confirms the case with a physician.
“Chikungunya went from Africa to Asia and then to Italy and France, if you can believe it. Now it’s in South America. It seems a lot of these tropical diseases are only a plane ride away.”
One precaution for an overseas traveler may be a visit to a travel physician. This is a medical doctor specializing in vaccinations and tropical diseases. Roe said the family physician would not customarily be the doctor to visit for tropical disease.
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