Spectrum of Disease and Relation to Place of Exposure among Ill Returned Travelers

Approximately 8 percent of travelers to the developing world require medical care during or after travel. Current understanding of morbidity profiles among ill returned travelers is based on limited data from the 1980s.

Thirty GeoSentinel sites, which are specialized travel or tropical-medicine clinics on six continents, contributed clinician-based sentinel surveillance data for 17,353 ill returned travelers. We compared the frequency of occurrence of each diagnosis among travelers returning from six developing regions of the world.