How much would you pay for travel vaccinations?
I can’t move either of my arms. "Oh that must be all that gym work you’ve been doing in a pre-wedding panic", I hear you cry. Sadly not (I have been going, but I never work so hard that I can’t move my arms the next day, that’s just silly). I have been injected with vaccines in both of my upper arms.
Yes, after the wedding comes the honeymoon. And with that comes the recommendation that both my fiancé and I should be injected with seemingly every vaccination under the sun.
Ok, so that’s an exaggeration. But the question still remains, when faced with so many possible vaccinations that you could have before travelling to some far flung place and most coming with a hefty price tag, which ones do you go for? And can you ever be moneysaving when it comes to this sort of thing?
Luckily, under the NHS I was able to go to the doctors and have a lot of the vaccines that I needed before our travels for free, leaving a slight dent in my arm, but not my wallet.
But the NHS only covers a certain number of vaccinations for the places we’re visiting, so we went to a private travel clinic to have a consultation on the other recommended vaccines that we might need. It was then that I started to feel faint from the prices being bandied around.
Here’s what the private clinic recommended to us for the different places we’re travelling to and the price tag attached to them:
- Japanese B Encephalitis – course of two, £100 per injection = £200.
- Hepatitis B – course of three, £35 per injection = £105.
- Rabies – course of three, £55 per injection = £165.
- Malaria – £2.30 per tablet + £10 prescription fee, we would need 10 = £33.
- Total cost: £503 – that’s over £1,000 for the two of us.
I’ve spoken to some people who have been to where we’re going and have just risked it, not having any of the vaccines – but one who as a result ran scared from a cave after they realised it had bats in it! And others who say you can’t put a price on your health and have gone for the whole kit and caboodle.
After all, maybe it’s better to spend a couple of hundred pounds now, rather than thousands of pounds if something goes wrong when you’re out there? Though hopefully a good insurance policy would kick in then!
As for me, I have decided to go with the rabies injections and the malaria tablets, the two things I feel are most important. But I am still very much in two minds about whether I should be trying to be moneysaving in this type of situation.
I don’t know the answer to this and would love to hear your opinions on it and what decision you’ve made in a similar situation. Please let us know your opinions in the discussion below or in the forum.
