Joseph Torresi - Manual of Travel Medicine

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The first edition of the Manual of Travel Medicine was published in 1999 through the Victorian Infectious Diseases Service at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, when the discipline of travel medicine in Australia was only in its infancy. At that time, there were few high-quality travel medicine information and education resources available. The Manual of Travel Medicine was a response to a perceived need for an authoritative and up-to-date resource to support good travel medicine practice. The first edition was written by Allen Yung and Tilman Ruff who together pioneered the growth of travel medicine in Australia. An expanded second edition saw the inclusion of three new authors, Joseph Torresi, Daniel OBrien and Karin Leder, and was published in 2004. This was followed by an extensively revised third edition in 2011 which saw the inclusion of further two authors, Mike Starr and Jim Black. With the increasing availability of many excellent travel health resources, it became essential to proceed with a fourth edition of the manual in order to deliver a concise up-to-date travel medicine book.

Travel medicine has changed significantly since 2004. In 2017, the World Tourism Organization reported that international tourist arrivals reached 1323 million, with a growth in international arrivals of 84 million compared to 2016. Almost ten million outbound trips were taken by Australians in 2017. A rising volume of travel is also being undertaken by high-risk groups, such as immunocompromised individuals including transplant recipients and HIV-positive people, the elderly, pregnant women and young children, which increase complexities surrounding health issues and disease risks. Travel medicine as a discipline has also evolved substantially, with an increasing body of knowledge in the international literature and the recognition of the need to make recommendations based on the best available evidence. Accordingly, there has been an intensified surveillance of health problems among travellers as well as a tremendous growth in original research in the field. Previous recommendations were often based on case reports, case series or small descriptive studies done by single institutions. Currently, more global and generalisable data is being analysed as a basis for updating travel advice. The research has been performed by large multicentre surveillance and collaborative networks such as the GeoSentinel Surveillance Network, TropNet Europe, EuroTropNet, CanTravNet in Canada and the US-based Boston Area Travel Medicine Network (BATMN). Comprehensive guidelines developed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Society of Travel Medicine (ISTM) around the growing body of data have now become widely available.

The explosion of travel health information is making it increasingly difficult to keep abreast of the latest advances in the field. The growing number of resources tends to complicate rather than simplify travel guidance, especially since there is lack of consensus between different resources on many aspects of travel health advice. For example, the European perspective on antimalarials is markedly different from the US perspective. There is also no national website providing detailed Australian consensus travel guidelines.