Travelers' Health

Helping to reduce illness and injury in U.S. residents traveling internationally or living abroad, through alerts, recommendations, education, and support to travelers and health care providers, based on the best science.

The Division of Global Migration and Quarantine’s (DGMQ) Travelers’ Health Branch (proposed name) monitors, analyzes, and reports occurrences of diseases and events of global public health significance.

Areas of focus include:

• studying and monitoring illness and injury among travelers
• health communication and education
• collaboration with external partners
• monitoring disease outbreaks and other health threats around the world that may affect travelers

The branch provides travel health advice, including vaccine recommendations and requirements, to international travelers and the health care providers who advise them.

The Travelers’ Health Branch also plays an integral role in CDC’s global emergency response efforts. The branch is responsible for developing and distributing event-specific advice regarding the risks of travel during an emergency, such as the H1N1 influenza pandemic, the Haiti earthquake and cholera outbreak, and the Japan earthquake and radiation release.

Health Communication and Education Team

The Health Communication and Education Team informs and educates a wide variety of audiences through traditional and innovative communication channels.

• Develops travel health guidance and recommendations for common diseases and health risks in international destinations, as well as for disease outbreaks and event-related risks
• Conducts audience research and evaluation to assess the need for and impact of travel health messages
• Develops and maintains the CDC Travelers’ Health website (www.cdc.gov/travel), which is consistently among CDC’s top five most visited websites (approximately 26 million page views in 2012)
• Publishes CDC Health Information for International Travel (the “Yellow Book”), the official U.S. government travel health recommendations
• Communicates travel health recommendations through social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook
• Develops maps of travel health risks, including maps of the distributions of diseases and at-risk populations, as well as transportation patterns
• Answers questions from the general public through the CDC-INFO call center and e-mail box

Surveillance and Epidemiology Team

The Surveillance and Epidemiology Team maintains travel-related health information from around the world and monitors data sources to identify risks that may impact the health and safety of globally mobile populations.

• Conducts studies of diseases spread through travel to increase knowledge and improve the accuracy of travel health recommendations
• Partnered with the International Society for Travel Medicine to establish the GeoSentinel Network Surveillance System, a worldwide network of more than 50 travel and tropical medicine clinics on 6 continents that collects health information
• Uses GeoSentinel data for monitoring travel-related illnesses and emerging infections, health alerts and advisories, and real-time reporting of disease events
• Establishes partnerships with consortiums of travel medicine clinics in the United States, including Global TravEpiNet, to assess pre-travel health care
• Fulfills CDC’s yellow fever regulatory responsibilities by maintaining the U.S. yellow fever registry, a national database of health care providers registered to administer the yellow fever vaccine
• Participates in intra-agency and international collaborations on yellow fever vaccine safety, global yellow fever risk classification, and vaccine recommendations