GERM
00:00:00.160 – 00:00:11.280
Kaya! My name is Germ.

WORM
00:00:11.360 – 00:00:12.320
I’m Worm.

GERM
00:00:12.400 – 00:00:27.680
Welcome to episode 83 of the Germ and Worm Travel Health Podcast. Which is worse, jungles or airport jungle gyms? It’s a big planet. See it in good health. I’m Dr. Paul Pottinger, also called Germ. I’m a professor of Infectious diseases at the University of Washington in Seattle.

WORM
00:00:27.680 – 00:00:35.360
I’m Dr. Chris Sanford, also known as Worm, associate Professor in the Departments of Family Medicine and Global Health, also at the University of Washington.

GERM
00:00:36.080 – 00:06:41.320
Well, here’s some of the crazy questions that we’re going to tackle today. They’re all so good. Is there really going to be a black box warning for COVID 19 vaccines? Are jungle gyms coming to airport terminals near me? Can a shingles vaccine reduce my risk of dementia? And vaccine safety and reliability Overseas what overseas vaccines? Can I really trust these questions and many more. They come to us from our listeners.

Our request to all of you, please do contact us with your own travel health questions, your stories, and your tips for success. Or you want to hear a clarification on something we’ve talked about before? Glad to do it. Just Visit our website germandworm.com or send us an emailgermandworm@gmail.com

Before we jump into these amazing questions, here is our medical disclaimer. This podcast is designed to inform, inspire and entertain, but you should not use this podcast as clinical care before you travel.

Please see a qualified healthcare professional for recommendations specific to you and your itinerary. So, Chris, I want to continue our tradition. We’re starting this new feature of the podcast called why you Should Go.

And I want to share my reasons why our listeners should consider going to Patagonia. So why should someone consider visiting Patagonia? What is Patagonia?

It’s just an enormous piece of wilderness, huge chunk of the southern part of the city, South American continent and the regions that we traditionally call Patagonia are bounded by the political boundaries of Chile and Argentina. Geographically, there’s some overlap there, and both of those countries offer amazing opportunities to get into Patagonia.

But again, for most people who visit Patagonia, they will probably be in both Argentina and Chile.

And I do recommend that that was our experience when I went with my son and my wife on a vacation in the northern spring, which was actually their fall just last year.

We were fortunate to have a great experience with a land guide, someone who was helping us make our transfers to and from different locations within Patagonia. But most of our time was spent at a really nice hotel. I really would Call it an eco lodge. Basically, it was a spa.

It was an ultra fancy spa and expensive, but really worth it. Tierra Patagonia was the name.

And, and this was incredible because it was actually located within the national park, right on a lake, basically, looking at the mountains. There are other ways to do this. You don’t have to do that. You can even stay in Puerto Natales or come in from Calafate.

There are different ways to get into this part of the world.

But whether you go with an ultra luxury experience or you’re interested in backpacking, going from hostels and lodges, both of those approaches give you great opportunity to spend time in what is one of the world’s great remaining wilderness areas. Now, as you probably know, this is about beautiful mountains, glaciers, lakes, forests, tundras. It’s also about the wildlife.

I remember very well looking out the window of our hotel and seeing a cougar, a mountain lion, looking right back at us, Wasn’t trying to eat us, was just curious, what are those guys doing in there? And so taking pictures of birds, including the Indian, condor, predators, all of the land mammals. It was quite an experience that way.

And it’s also about being able to handle the weather. They do call it Windygonia for a reason.

The wind that can come is substantial, tends to be predominantly wind coming from the west, blowing west to east, and it can be quite harsh and it can bring with it a lot of precipitation, not just rain, but also snow. And so this is a real concern.

And I just want to raise this because there was a tragic loss of life in the national park, very close to where we had stayed just a few months ago, in which I think a number of people who were making a giant circuit, a trek through the mountains, they got bad advice from an innkeeper. They were told that it was a good time to go. And unfortunately, frostbite and hypothermia claimed a number of lives.

So my point is, if you’re going to go to Patagonia, do it because you love the adventure. You want to hike in one of the most beautiful places in the world. To me, honestly, unsurpassed with people who are super friendly.

The local people, both Argentina and Chilean, amazing, inspiring, fun people, and they like to share their natural beauty with you. The challenge is please hire a reputable guide. I mean, that’s my advice to you. If you’re going to spend time in the mountains, you want to be guided.

It doesn’t mean that you’re admitting defeat. It doesn’t mean that you can’t take care of yourself. It just means that this is a local knowledge that cannot be reproduced.

And because the conditions are so harsh, in some cases, you, you really just don’t want to put yourself at risk of hypothermia. That’s what I’m getting towards.

Hiring a local guide can mean learning more about the natural beauty, the human history, and just enhancing your safety when you’re there. So that is something that I recommend. Actually that’s true in the context of many international treks, but in Patagonia for sure.

So I think that’s the reason to go to Patagonia, to have an adventure, to be outside, to make new friends.

If you’re interested in the food scene, if you’re into museums, sort of like I talked about recently with respect to Antarctica, those are not reasons to go to Patagonia. Although the cuisine is totally fine. But this is not about a cosmopolitan experience. It’s about a natural and wild experience.

If you have a hunger for adventure, Patagonia is calling. By the way, I’m not a fisher person, fisherman, but apparently people who do go fly fishing find that that is also an amazing opportunity there too.

So that’s another reason why you might potentially want to go to Patagonia. If you do choose to visit Patagonia, you know we’d love to hear from you.

Send us a quick email letting us know what your experience was like germandworm@gmail.com and if you haven’t yet gone, please consider it and let us know what you think. Okay, Chris, with that, let me ask you a question.

What is a black box warning and why is the FDA looking like it’s gonna put one on our Covid vaccines?

WORM
00:06:41.720 – 00:08:03.790
Oh boy. Well, this unfortunately is another political decision that’s coming out of the FDA bas a black box warning, also known as a boxed warning.

It’s the highest level of safety related warning that the FDA puts on some medicines. So for example, it’s put this on the malaria medication Mefloquin because of the relatively high rate of side effects that Mefloquin has.

It basically says this drug or vaccine is still on the market, but it’s high side effect. So beware, be careful, this thing may do a lot of harm.

And unfortunately, word within the FDA is that they are seriously considering putting this level of warning on COVID 19 vaccines. And in my opinion this is grossly inappropriate.

The COVID 19 vaccine, and we’ve talked about this ad nauseam, it is a low side effect, efficacious vaccine. It’s been used on Tens of millions of people. And sure, it can cause side effects.

You can get a sore arm, you can even get a low grade fever for a day or two. These tend to be rare, rare and mild and transient. And relative to the benefit of not dying of COVID it’s a phenomenally helpful vaccine.

So I think this is a politically motivated change. And again, it’s something else destructive that RFK Jr. Is doing to our healthcare system.

GERM
00:08:04.670 – 00:10:56.640
Yeah, it’s idiotic.

So in an auspicious timing here, we also by coincidence have a nice new report from World Health Organization looking at vaccine safety and finding no link whatsoever, yet again, for the umpteenth time, no link between vaccines and autism spectrum disorder. This is one of the things that the current administration is saying that if you get a vaccine, you might get autism doesn’t work like that.

And here yet again, the World Health Organization has a recent report published just in December of 2025 showing that this vaccine safety committee at World Health, which is a real committee, it is made of scientists, not politicians. And you know, they’ve assessed.

Two systemic reviews cover studies published between 2010 and 2025, actually August of 2025 and 20 out of those 31 studies found no evidence of any association between vaccines and autism. And of the 11 that suggested a possible link, they were all deemed to be bogus, or as my son says, bungus, they were just bad news.

They all had major methodological flaws, a high risk of bias. So the science is clear, you don’t get autism from vaccines. And number two for the kids, COVID vaccine and kids.

We also know that that’s not only safe and effective, but just overall a good societal thing.

So Centers for Disease Control published just in December of 2025 in their morbidity and Mortality Weekly report, a report showing that Covid shots cut the risk of children needing to get medical care during the first six months after vaccination by 76% in kids under 4 years old. And it cut the risk about in half by 56% in kids age 5 to 17. A big deal.

They looked at almost 100,000 emergency room visits in America, 98,000 emergency room and urgent care visits. And kids, including in this study, you know, they had various levels of immunity from prior Covid vaccines and prior COVID infection.

So this study looked only at the added protection from the 2024-2025 series of COVID vaccines.

In other words, if you don’t want to have to go to the emergency room or urgent care and you don’t want to have to take your kid in, you get them their Covid shot. So this concept of a black box warning, we don’t yet have the details on this at the time we record this conversation December 12, 2025.

But it sounds like an absolute mistake. Black box warning is there for something that’s hazardous.

So the prescriber knows that they are going to use this in only in specific circumstances or acknowledging a high level of risk. This is different. These vaccines should go to everybody to reduce their risk of a bad outcome. So yet again, it sounds like a disaster.

This is something that we can undo later. It’s another way they’re trying to erode our confidence in the vaccines. What it’s actually doing is eroding American confidence in fda.

And so my hope is that we can get a real administration and fix it down the line. Bottom line, please get your Covid shot.

WORM
00:10:57.520 – 00:11:12.080
Related question on a different vaccine. So the shingles vaccine has been shown repeatedly to bring down the risk of shingles in vaccine recipients.

Paul, does it have any other advantages other than bringing the risk down of the specific disease? Shingles?

GERM
00:11:13.170 – 00:14:31.890
Yeah, there are benefits.

So first of all, for those who don’t know, shingles is a reactivation of the nervous system that contains an infection we usually get in childhood called varicella. When we first get chickenpox as kids, typically we have a generalized rash and fever illness. Typically miserable, can be dangerous.

That is a DNA virus in the herpes virus family. So it never really goes away, right, Chris? It stays with us for life. As we get older, our immune system gets older too.

And that varicella virus can reactivate, come out of the spinal column and go down to our peripheral nerves and cause a terrible painful blistering rash. We call that shingles. There is a wonderful vaccine called Shingrix here in the United States. It’s not a live attenuated vaccine.

It’s a virus like particle.

It’s a very safe technology and it dramatically reduces the chance of either getting shingles or if you do get it, it really attenuates, meaning it reduces the severity of that. So the benefit that we have been touting this vaccine for is that you’re less likely to have a bad case of shingles. Shingles can be debilitating.

Some of our listeners will have had it. It’s an awful situation. But now there’s this new appreciation that there may be other benefits. As you have asked about, case in point, dementia.

There is a growing number of papers which are seem to be of high scientific quality showing that your risk of developing dementia down the line in years to come is reduced if you have this shingles immunization. So one case in point is one that we can talk about today.

The paper that prompts this question comes to us from a journal called Nature Medicine that looks into the science of this.

In this analysis, researchers have looked at healthcare records of more than 100 million patients in more than 7,000 hospitals and clinics between the years 2007 and 2023. That is a large n, a large data set. It’s very impressive.

And what they did was to zero in on people have received the shingles vaccine and those who did not. Among those who had gotten the shingles vaccine in their lifetime, their risk of going on subsequently to develop dementia was cut by a third.

A 33% reduction in those who had received that vaccine compared to the comparators. And who did they choose as comparators? Not just anybody, but folks in the same age category who had received the pneumococcal vaccine.

That’s the pneumonia shot. We’ve talked about that. People who get their pneumonia shot should generally also get their shingles shot.

Now, not everybody gets both, but the point is, the same age categories, those are the same general health concerns.

In this particular analysis, those who got the pneumonia shot were, in effect, working as controls, and they were 33% more likely to go on to get dementia.

The suggestion is that it’s possible that the varicella virus itself may be so inflammatory, and we know that it lives in the spinal column, that it may actually have central nervous system effects leading to dementia. The hypothesis that dementia may be caused in some cases at least in part, due to ongoing inflammation.

And if we don’t have that inflammation, we may be at lower risk of dementia. So this is an exciting off target effect which may become yet another of the many good reasons to go ahead and get your shingles shot.

If you are listening to my voice and you’re over the age of 50 and you don’t have your shingle shot, please, please, please go ahead and get it. Not only because I want to protect you from shingles, but I certainly hope you don’t go on to develop dementia.

Chris, what’s your thought about this analysis?

WORM
00:14:31.890 – 00:15:05.500
Yeah, I think it looks very legit. Some lovely papers have come out. As you stated, dementia is complex. There’s not one thing that causes it.

There are several things that are statistically linked to it. For example, alcohol abuse makes your risk higher. A family history makes your risk higher.

Lack of physical exercise, lack of Social context in your life, social contacts will make your risk higher. My thought, given how horrible dementia is and how much we all want to avoid it, is do everything that is associated with a lower risk.

And that looks like that now includes getting a shingle shot.

GERM
00:15:05.900 – 00:15:10.460
Especially knowing that this is something we need to do anyway has other benefits.

WORM
00:15:10.620 – 00:15:12.460
It’s a twofer. It’s a big twofer.

GERM
00:15:12.700 – 00:15:29.670
I’m with you. Okay, Chris, question to you. What’s the quality of vaccines that I could obtain overseas?

WORM
00:15:29.750 – 00:17:08.680
Oh, good question. This question comes up for many reasons. One is that often vaccines overseas are cheaper.

Some of our US vaccines are exorbitant, like rabies or Japanese encephalitis. You can drop $1,000 or more on a vaccine series. I can’t give you one size fits all for quality.

But as a general rule, vaccine quality control in income countries is good. So if I’m going to Canada or Japan or the United Kingdom or Australia, I’m going to feel pretty good about getting their vaccines.

From everything I’ve read, they have very good quality control. Lower income countries, it can be more hit or miss.

There was this recent, rather frightening report out of India where there was a large amount of counterfeit rabies vaccine circulating. People were getting a good price on it, but when the stuff was analyzed, it was not rabies vaccine. This is a big deal.

There’s a lot of rabies in India and especially for the folks who live there, they want to get the real stuff. It’s a horrible disease. Once you get symptoms, it’s 100% fatal. So my suspicion is that most of the vaccine in these countries is good, but not all.

But maintaining a vaccine is a complex process, as is the manufacturing. Once you’ve made it, you have to keep a lot of them at certain temperatures. If they heat up and then cool down again, they’re ruined.

So this is a long way of saying high income countries, good control, low income countries often good. But variable me.

If you’re going to have a significant exposure to an illness such as rabies, like maybe you’re mountaineering, you’re going to be out in the sticks for a while. I would spring for the more expensive stuff in a high income nation.

GERM
00:17:09.320 – 00:17:40.470
I think that’s right.

In the context of rabies in particular, if you are, let’s say, bitten by a dog when you’re trekking someplace overseas, you know, you have a little bit of time to deal with that. And if I had to choose between coming home and doing it in that local context, you know, it may Be fine to do it in the local context.

You just need to understand the level of evidence for that particular vaccine supply. Bottom line here, getting your vaccines when you can in the US other related countries is probably the right way to.

WORM
00:17:46.560 – 00:18:03.360
Paul, this question comes to you. This is from Anna in Tucson. My social feed just sent me a crazy video of a guy whose parachute got caught on the wing of a plane.

Please tell me this is not going to happen when I go skydiving. I just got a gift from my kids for my 50th birthday.

GERM
00:18:03.760 – 00:21:34.500
Oh, Anna, that’s great. So your kids, they’re not trying to kill you. This actually can be done very safely and so it sounds like a fun plan to do. Context.

I actually do not skydive myself, although I think it’s great and I have friends who do. So I’m not anti skydiving. Quite the opposite. I think it can be done safely.

Now that video you’re talking about, Anna, that came to me in my own feed as well on YouTube and I think it’s the one you’re talking about. So what happened here was a little bit different from what you described. Actually.

This is a video that comes to us from Australia and has been analyzed by the Australian transit authorities there. They’ve done a root cause analysis. This is a group of people who were doing a whole bunch of skydiving all at the same time jumping out of a plane.

And one of them, as they got out of the plane to do the jump, unfortunately, the reserve chute, that’s your backup chute, you know, the ripcord, the handle to deploy, that got caught on the flap of the wing. So actually what happened was they stepped out of the plane and they opened their chute immediately when they were still holding onto the plane.

That parachute instantly opened because the plane is moving along 100 miles an hour, whatever, and the parachute got stuck on the horizontal stabilizer on the tail of that plane.

Now they, they saw what was going on, but unfortunately because of the drag that was there with the parachute, that person got sucked off into the sky and fell.

And so that what they had to do was, believe it or not, take a knife, a hook shaped knife, and saw through the cords of this reserve chute so that they could ultimately get released into the sky. And when they fell, they then deployed their regular chute. It got trapped in the remnants of the reserve chute.

But they were able to make that untangled and land safely. This person did okay, minor injuries. That’s a freak of nature. I’ve never Heard of such a thing happening. It does probably not apply to you.

If you’re going through this as a first time experience. You know, as long as you’re going with a reputable vendor, us, Australia or elsewhere, you should be okay.

So how do you know you’re going to the right place?

Apparently there’s something called the US Parachute association, uspa and that’s a group that is, you know, trying to set industry standards, making sure that vendors are doing the right thing, that training is adhered to and it gives consumer a chance to go online and vet the checkout, the place that they’re considering going.

So I would suggest if you have any questions about the place that you’re going to, you can go to the USPA and see if they have records on that particular company. But there are affiliations and standards that you should look for.

You want to make sure that your, your jump master knows what they’re doing, that they have many dives. Most of these instructors will literally have thousands of dives under their belt, which is terrific. And there should be a very clear ground school.

They don’t just take you up there and throw you off the plane. It’s just a whole day process.

There’s an orientation on the ground before you go and you should have, you know, the opportunity to practice things on the ground before you get up there and that all your questions are answered right. Smaller groups are good one to one diving for someone like what you’re talking about makes sense.

But even up to maybe three or four students for one jump master could be okay in some cases. And obviously there should be an automatic activation system and a reserve static line in some cases may be helpful too.

There’s a whole bunch of safety issues. It’s not just that they, they don’t want to hurt you. They also don’t want to ruin their business.

If somebody dies or is injured in a jump that ruins their whole business. They have a lot of incentives to do this safely. And I’m confident and hopefully you’ll have a great time. Please send us an email.

Videos and photos are welcome of you on your 50th birthday, making the jump.

WORM
00:21:34.980 – 00:22:24.040
Yeah. There’s a rule in medicine that has implications for choosing your skydiving school.

The rule in medicine is when you look at the safety rate of certain medical procedures, really all medical procedures, from heart surgery to brain surgery, an institution that does a lot of it will have a better safety record than an institution such as a hospital that does a smaller number of them. So if a hospital only does one heart surgery per month, they’re going to have a higher complication rate than a place that does a bunch every day.

Similarly, you should ask some questions of your instructor. And a good question is, how many jumps have you done? And if he or she has done thousands, that’s a good thing.

If they look healthy, if they say, oh, you and me are going to learn together, that’s a warning sign. I would back off and find someone who has done this a bazillion times.

GERM
00:22:24.200 – 00:22:46.830
Needless to say, life is full of all kinds of opportunities to cut corners. Jumping out of a plane, not one of them. Okay, Chris, this question comes to you from me.

What the hell is going on with RFK Jr putting jungle gyms in airports? I’ve seen videos about this. Please tell me this is AI generated and fake news.

WORM
00:22:46.910 – 00:23:47.650
No, I think it’s real. I saw a video of RFK Jr showing off for a group of people how he can do a bunch of pull ups and you know, go, RFK junior.

Yeah, exercise is good for you. I’ll grant him that. But, but holy crap, this is so tangential. He is Secretary of Health and Human Services. He’s got this massive budget.

He’s trying to, or he should be trying to help the health of all Americans. He seems to be ignoring the biggest concerns.

There are huge ongoing threats that affect millions of people and this would include obesity and tobacco and alcohol abuse and lack of medical care for low income people. Instead, he’s talking about putting pull up bars in airports. I think he just wanted to show off for people that he could do pull ups.

This is tangential. It is bizarre. It’s another example of a downside of putting a person with no medical training in a position of power in the government.

GERM
00:23:49.010 – 00:25:10.040
I mean, I almost feel bad for him. I don’t, because he should know better. But he’s just, thank goodness he’s reliable. I mean, he’s become a staple here on German Worm.

And if it weren’t for him, what would we talk about yet again? It’s well intentioned, but it’s just wrong. So putting jungle gyms up in the airports, who’s going to watch the kids who are playing on those things?

The video that I saw was actually, I think at national and there’s a terrazzo floor. What if somebody slips, cracks their skull open on the ground? Who is going to take care of people who injure themselves pumping iron in the airport?

Can you actually slip one of those weights onto the plane and use it as a weapon? There’s all kinds of things that have been thought through here.

And aside from the idea of who cleans and maintains these pieces of equipment, it seems to me that our airports have a lot of issues. Like we don’t have enough screeners to make sure that we come through quickly at the check in process.

And our air traffic control system is, to me, totally broken. We have a lot of near misses, a lot of things we can do in the airport. Putting a gym in there, not so much. Now I do think people should stay active.

I like the idea of walking around the airport port. That’s all good. You don’t want to get a blood clot and if you want to pump iron, it’s fine.

It’s just hard to imagine we’re going to spend a lot of money doing this yet again. What a doofus.

WORM
00:25:10.600 – 00:25:16.280
Yeah, he seems to be getting involved in his pet little interests with unawareness of larger issues.

GERM
00:25:16.920 – 00:25:21.080
Yeah, go to the jungle, but don’t spend time on the jungle gym in the airport.

WORM
00:25:22.840 – 00:25:36.010
Paul, this next question comes for you. This is from Anonymous. I always get sick before I fly. Always. When is it safe for me to fly and see my family over the holidays?

And after I get sick, how many days do I have to wait?

GERM
00:25:36.650 – 00:27:31.370
Yeah, good question. There’s, it depends on the illness, but I think we’re talking about respiratory illness, right? Especially with the holidays, time of year.

Yep, it’s wintertime. We do have an increase, generally speaking, in respiratory illness, usually viral as the source, rhinovirus, influenza, coronavirus, you name it.

So there’s two concerns. First is for you personally, and when are you going to be safe enough to have a good experience.

And then there’s a question about everybody else, the public health part. So I’ll talk about the personal bit and then I’ll turn to Chris for the public health bit for you.

Look, you need to be able to clear your nose, clear your airways before you go. We talked in a similar context with Dr. Greg Davis about this on a recent episode talking about dive medicine.

And he says if you got a cold, you need to clear your ears by equalizing the pressure before you get in the water. Otherwise you could end up with an ear squeeze. I think it’s the same with the airplane.

You’re not going to high pressure, you’re going to low pressure. But if you’re sitting at home thinking, hey, should I fly today? Can you hear the tv? Can you actually clear your airway by popping your ears?

And if you cannot, I really do not think you should go. This can be dangerous. For your hearing. Remember, if you.

If you rupture one of those tender membranes in your middle or inner ear, that can have significant hearing consequences. So that’s a hearing safety issue. Plus, it’s incredibly painful. We’ve all had that experience. Right. So you want to try to avoid that.

I’m not usually worried about someone getting into that dry air atmosphere triggering a coughing spasm, although that’s possible, too. No, for me, it’s usually more about sinus pressure, ear pressure.

On your own personal situation, I do not recommend that people fly if they have a fever, and I do not recommend that people fly if they can’t control their coughing or their sneezing. That’s for themselves and for others. Chris, what about you? What’s your philosophy about safety to the other people on the plane?

WORM
00:27:31.450 – 00:28:14.200
Well, there’s something that I’ll call the golden rule of infectious disease, which goes something like, don’t cough on others as you would have them not cough on you. And just think about it. Do you really want to get on a jet and sit inches away from somebody and snot on them or cough on them for the whole flight?

Would you like it if someone else did that to you? So I think it is a courtesy not to spread this with people on the jet, but also your family who you’re going to visit.

Maybe there’s someone elderly there who’s at risk for a bad outcome if they get sick.

So I think, out of consideration for others, it’s only good manners as a global citizen to wait until you are not infectious, till you’re feeling better, before you get on something like a jet where you’re crowded with a lot of other people.

GERM
00:28:14.520 – 00:30:37.190
Yeah, I agree. And so when are you not infectious? One of the fascinating issues with the COVID experience was our evolving understanding of viral epidemiology.

And with the coronavirus, more than any other that I know of, maybe except for measles, you know, you spread most when you have no symptoms, right? That’s the curse, and that’s why it exploded across the globe. Turns out that by the time you’re symptomatic, you are still shedding virus.

But that’s on the downtrend.

So the current guidance is typically to say, hey, you can be out and about in society, airplane or otherwise, when it’s been a day, 24 hours without a fever, and no cheating with acetaminophen or ibuprofen, but your fever is truly gone by itself. It’s been a day. And you can do something to control your secretion so for those next five days you can start your clock when your fever is gone.

But for those next five days you really want to cover your face with a high quality mask. When you’re out, you will still continue to shed a little bit of virus that could be catchy to others.

If you’re going to fly in that context, for example, hey yeah, do yourself a favor and everybody else put on a high quality N95 or KN95 mask that can dramatically, dramatically reduce the chance of you spreading it to other. There are some masks that have a little exhalation port, a little rubber valve where you can just blow out through the mask. That’s not good.

You’re still going to blow out your snot sickles through that thing. But if you have a true mask, then I think at a day after the fever is gone, for those next five days, cover up.

And that can be of a nice courtesy to everybody you meet, including your own family. Everyone thanks so much for joining us for episode 83 of Germ and Worm. As always, we welcome your questions on Travel Health.

Just send us your questions or your tips for safety, success or questions about something you’ve heard already on the podcast. Want a correction? Just let us know germanworm gmail.com or visit our website germandworm.com if you’ve enjoyed this episode, please subscribe.

Rate us favorably on your device and spread the word with friends, family and on the socials. Those are free ways to support this podcast. I’m Germ.

WORM
00:30:37.190 – 00:30:40.070
I’m Worm. It’s a big planet. See it in good health and we’ll.

GERM
00:30:40.070 – 00:31:02.260
See you next time. This podcast is designed to inform, inspire and entertain.

However, this podcast does not establish a doctor patient relationship and therefore it should not replace your conversation with a qualified healthcare professional. Please see one before your next adventure.

The opinions in this podcast are Dr. Sanford’s and Dr. Pottinger’s alone and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the University of Washington or UW Medicine.