If you are travelling overseas, there will be all sorts of health threats you may encounter that are not present in the UK. This means you might visit our travel health clinic seeking jabs for a range of possible diseases, as well as other medication for different threats.
Many of these are very familiar, such as malaria and dengue fever, yellow fever, or hepatitis A and B. There are all sorts of ways to tackle these, from vaccinations to taking anti-malarial tablets, wearing long and light clothing to cover arms and legs at night and using lots of insect repellent.
Not Just A Threat In Japan
Japanese encephalitis is rather less familiar. It is a lot rarer than infections like malaria, although it is also a tropical disease spread by insect bites. As the name suggests, it can be caught in Japan, but it is also found in other Asian countries, including India, China, South Korea, Indonesia and several south-east Asian countries.
Indeed, to at least some extent around half the world’s population is at threat of the virus, mainly due to the fact the affected region is the most populated in the world, with two countries of over a billion people.
The fact that it can be caught in countries like Japan and South Korea also shows that it is not a disease of the developing world. Instead, the main areas of risk are in rural areas. There is a heightened risk in wetland areas, places where rice is grown and locations where pigs are kept.
Even then, however, it is not always present in all rural parts of these countries. For instance, in India, it is only a year-round threat in the hotter southern regions, whereas further north it is usually only a danger between May and October.
Symptoms Of Japanese Encephalitis
Fortunately, most people who are bitten don’t suffer any symptoms at all. Those who do tend to get problems like a headache, tummy trouble, nausea and a high temperature. However, in a few cases, it becomes something much more serious as the infection spreads to the brain.
In these cases, sufferers can endure dizziness, confusion, paralysis in parts of the body and seizures. In such cases, the disease can be life-threatening and you will need to seek urgent hospital treatment with medications like steroids and painkillers. However, lingering symptoms such as loss of movement or speech can be long-term problems.
These are all compelling reasons to make sure you don’t catch Japanese encephalitis in the first place. As with all insect-borne viruses, you can use insect repellents to deter mosquitoes and wear long, pale clothing at night to deter them and avoid presenting an obvious target.
Vaccinations For Japanese Encephalitis
Nonetheless, getting vaccinated is your best way of protecting yourself from the disease. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take any precautions against mosquitoes, not least because no vaccine is 100 per cent sure to work every time, but, as with other insect-borne diseases, it does greatly reduce the chance of getting ill if you are bitten.
Vaccines against Japanese encephalitis are not new. The first one was developed in 1935 using cells from mouse brains. This is no longer in use, which is perhaps as well, as no doubt some anti-vaxxers would claim you’ll start squeaking and eating cheese if you have it.
Several other vaccines have been developed over time, including a viral vector vaccine dating from the 1970s that uses the same delivery method as the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
The most modern means of producing a vaccine, which Pfizer used to develop its own revolutionary COVID-19 vaccine, is Messenger RNA (mRNA). According to the Korea Biomedical Review, research is taking place into the development of an mRNA vaccine for Japanese encephalitis.
Keep Yourself Safe
Which vaccine you get does not matter too much, as they are all very effective, especially in the first year after your jab when efficacy can be higher than 90 per cent. What matters is that you do get it because an infection not only threatens you with long-term symptoms, but because, if you are staying in a rural area, you may be far from a good hospital.
Thanks to widespread vaccination, many millions who might die or get very seriously ill every year are spared this calamity. If you are travelling to affected countries, it is the wisest of moves to get the protection you need.
In addition, the very fact that you can catch such a dangerous disease in some advanced countries is also a reminder that, no matter where you are travelling in the world, it is important to check out first what you need to be as safe as possible when travelling – and to see us for your medical needs.