Vive Vivotif Typhoid Vaccine

I was pretty nervous before I headed off to Asia the first time, at the age of 18. I wish I could go back now and tell my younger self that by the time I was on the plane, the hardest part was already behind me (so to speak). I’m talking about the inoculations and medications required for entry to Taiwan.

The tetanus shot was no fun, because tetanus never is. The hepatitis series was rough, injected as they were in a place that, well, let’s just say it was impossible for the doctor to look me in the eye when he did it. Malaria meds were scary because of the horror stories I’d heard about psychological side effects. (Although if they gave me weird dreams, they weren’t sufficiently more strange than my usual teenaged imaginings for me to notice.)

The worst part was the typhoid vaccine. It was one little prick in the arm, barely noticeable. Later that afternoon, however, I suddenly felt unbearably cold on a warm day and started shivering uncontrollably in a movie theater. (Later I was talking to the friend I’d seen the movie with, and we discovered that we remembered almost entirely different movies. The one I’d feverishly imagined sounded like the more interesting of the two.) By the time I dragged myself home, I was bone-tired, burning up with fever, and sick as a dog. It occurred to me that I should write my roommates a note explaining that I’d had a vaccine that had gone horribly wrong, in case one of them discovered me dead, but you might as well have asked me to write a novel. I couldn’t even begin to tackle the task without at least 18 hours of sleep. It was hard for me to imagine that full-blown typhoid fever could make me any sicker than I felt right then.

So I wasn’t looking forward to a visit to The Travel Doctor, a little clinic in Oakland specializing in turning adventure travelers into human dartboards. It was almost all good news, though. It turns out I’m traveling in Japan a few weeks ahead of Japanese encephalitis season. I had a tetanus shot a few years ago, and it’s still good. The hepatitis series I got to go to Cuba in 2003 will protect me through 2018. The greater Shanghai and Beijing areas have been declared malaria free, and the areas I’ll be visiting by train are too far north for malaria-bearing mosquitoes.

The only preventative measure I needed was the dreaded typhoid vaccine, the old one having expired some time ago. But good news there, too: The old vaccine is off the market (“It gave everyone a fever,” the Travel Doctor doctor told me when I complained.) The new one hardly makes anyone shake uncontrollably, and best of all, there’s an oral form. Gluttons for punishment can still choose to have an injection, which has the advantage of being over and done with quickly. But I chose to try the oral form, which consists of four capsules, taken on an empty stomach every other day.

The verdict? It was a little bit inconvenient to keep track of which days I needed to take a pill, and hard for me to time doses two hours after a meal, and one hour before beginning to feed again. (I’m not proud of this, I’m just saying.) But I’d still pick this regimen over a shot any day. The very mild G.I. issues I had were hands-down better than thinking I was going to die of fever. Three cheers for medical science.