Travel Health Advice Provided by In-flight Magazines of International Airlines in Australia.
More than 3 million Australians travel overseas each year, and the most popular destination for these Australian travelers is Asia. Many of the countries in the Asian region are developing, and travelers to such countries may encounter tropical illness or serious injury, particularly diarrheal disease and motor vehicle accidents.1 The latter is the most common preventable cause of death in travelers.2 These problems are in addition to some of the potential problems associated with international flights, such as swelling feet, dehydration, jet lag, and venous thrombosis. There are a number of media through which travelers could receive travel health advice. However, a study of travel agent brochures by Reid et al.3 indicated that about one-third of these carried no travel health advice, with most of those that did carry travel advice providing only general information. Airline magazines also represent a possible source of in-flight and destination-specific travel health advice to which most travelers would have access.
Leggat
PA
Department of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, James Cook University of North Queensland, Australia.