Ausgabe 1/2006

Dear Reader,

traveling educates and makes the people come together.
Many interesting and exotic places around the world invite us for a stop. International conferences are taking place all over the globe. Global player send their employees to more and more new manufacturing bases. All these actions take us to far flung places at frequent time intervals.
Despite of our engineered society with luxurious and comfortable quarters at nearly any place, every journey to a foreign spot bears a small adventure for us. Just this mixture of curiosity and tension makes us get away from it all, brings up recreation or even a kind of variety in the case of business trips. However every journey whatever its cause may be for instance family traveling, short trip or business trip needs to deal with the culture, conventions, food, language, climate and geography of the travel country even though for a short moment.
But in the same way as we adjust our self to the speech or the climate we also should take short considerations about obstacles for our health which come along with the journey. Simply because we should feel in charge for the people of the visited country, for our fellows at home and even for our self.
Words like pandemia haunt through the media just now.
Often we do not need complex and extensive medical services for health care, but rather it requires aimed information of our self. This journal shows us, that this knowledge not necessarily must be boring, but also could be enjoyable and informative at the same time. The knowledge about our health in unaccustomedly environments reduces the distance to the visited country, brings us security, and leads us to an easygoing traveling. I wish you a pleasant journey and us many interesting, informative issues of “The Travelmedicus”.

Sincerely yours,

Prof. Dr. Jörg Becker-Schweitzer
University of Applied Science Duesseldorf

Letter from the Editor

STRANGE BEHAVIOUR

Dear Reader,

this is our very first edition of “The Travelmedicus” and our aim is to deliver useful information about travel and medicine. Maybe now you are asking yourself “Why are they doing that? And why do they start with Indonesia?”

Traveling nowadays is – most of time – joy, but due to internalisation, we are also exposed to a lot of diseases, many of them not being common in our home country.

Most things in life usually happen for a reason but that doesn’t mean we necessarily understand them. I’ve been traveling to Indonesia for a number of times and there are still numerous aspects of the local culture that I can’t get my head around. A few I will list now and if anyone can enlighten me I’d be most appreciative.

- Attitudes to ambulances
An integral part of learning to drive in Germany, where I’m from, is that one gives way to fires engines, police vehicles and ambulances when they have their lights flashing and sirens wailing. They are, after all, called the emergency services for a reason. It’s not as if it just a case of a grumpy employee wanting to get through the traffic that little bit quicker – although I do have my doubts at times… In Indonesia things are slightly different and I can’t quite work out why. Motorists virtually always get out of the way of police vehicles and usually pull over to let fire engines pass. But ambulances, not on your life – or rather not on the life of the potentially dying person inside.
It’s as if motorists have an I-don’t-know-the-person-stuck-in-the-ambulance-so-why-should-I-be-sympathetic sort of attitude. If they’ve fallen sick it must be because they deserved it or because of fate. Either way, they’re getting their just desserts. But don’t motorists think that if they were in the ambulance they’d like to get to hospital just a little bit quicker. Saving 30 seconds (or perhaps 30 minutes since we’re talking about Indonesia) really could make the difference between life and death. What makes it even more perplexing to me is that virtually all motorists give way to the death. You know, the motorcades with the guys waving yellow flags. Yup that’s a funeral procession you’ve just come across. Hello there! What’s going on here? Give way to someone who is usually not in a hurry to get anywhere (I do understand Muslims have to buried within 24 hours but timings are not usually THAT tight) but don’t help someone who’d probably like to hang around on the planet a little bit longer.

- Watering the road
I was brought up to water plants and the lawn or else they’ll wither and die. In Indonesia, however, it’s amazing how many people stand at the side of the road and water the asphalt in front of their house. It can’t be because they want to get rid of the crud on the street because then they’d look as if they meant business. Most road waterers just stand there, hose in hand, whiling away the day. It’s Homer Simpson school of horticulture. Perhaps they want to get rid of the dust. But why do it for so long, if that is the case?
I reckon watering the road is so perculiarly Indonesian it must have been one of those tests Indonesians gave foreigners during the second world war to see if they were spies, just like Brits asked people to pronounce the name Worcester or Llewellyn (although I’m not sure how many asphalt roads there were in Indonesia in the early 1940s).

- Overloading boats
Have you ever been on an Indonesian public ferry that was not overcrowded? Surely we can squeeze another person on, or another 50. Or even another 500. It seems to me that the ferry operators don’t quite understand that if an overloaded public bus collapses under the weight of its passengers it sinks fifteen cm but that if a ferry from Bali to Lombok suffers the same fate it will sink fifteen million cm. Perhaps operators know the manufacturers put a bit of safety leeway into the advertised capacity so and they want to test exactly what the extent of that leeway is. They don’t seem to realize that there’s only one way to find out. Or maybe it is all about profit. If I take an extra person I’ll make another 3.000 Rupiah and if I take another 500 people I’ll make another 1.5 million Rupiah. Never mind that I’ll have to spend the earnings paying for a new boat after the first one ends up. I guess it’s all about fate again.

- Aeroplane cabin luggage
In most countries I dread getting on a flight when I see someone who is, shall we say, the size of my wife and I put together in the departure lounge. Murphy’s law says that the sniggering person at check-in has put me next to them.
In Indonesia there are so few fat people one rarely has to worry about this. But what there are instead are squillions of passengers who have 23 pieces of cabin luggage. And they’re always the last to get on the plane, once the overhead lockers are full and so they have to squeeze everything into the tiny space under the seat in front of them – which means in front of me. Why do the airlines allow it? Don’t they understand the inconvenience to other people. I mean you can’t tell a fat person to shed 30kgs before they board but you can tell a thin person with 23 bags that he or she will have to leave half of them behind. Does he, or she, really need six boxes of mangoes? Alternatively, get rid of the sign that says “One piece of cabin luggage only”. At least that would be a bit more honest.

But what do we learn while thinking about “this and that” while traveling around? Anticipation is the greatest pleasure. While already on tour there are so many fascinating impressions. Home again we have to jump into work promptly. And so starts a global problem I can’t get my head around too.
What is the reason we do not have a better, individual, easy understandable, direct accessible and trustworthy possibility in promoting the travel medicine prevention work. Who needs to be afraid of these themes?

By promoting the travel medicine prevention work, we make traveller more aware and attentive. As a positive consequence, the danger of potential and global spread of sickness are reduced.

The Travelmedicus only want to offer helpful information and make you feel like traveling to new destinations – in this edition we start with Indonesia.

If you’d like to voice your opinion, your letter or email are welcome!

Truly yours
Thomas Ly