TRAVELERS NEED TO KNOW
The travel industry is responding by making it easier for people to reschedule their trips or even get full refunds.
Hilton Worldwide and Hyatt hotels are waiving cancellation fees in affected areas. Marriott International and Wyndham Hotels and Resorts are addressing cancellation requests on a caseby-case basis but being liberal in waiving fees. Delta, JetBlue and other airlines also are allowing customers to rebook or cancel flights to affected areas within certain time periods without paying a fee. United is granting rebookings and cancellations with no fee. American Airlines is letting pregnant women and their companions request refunds with a doctor’s note.
But health experts say not all travelers should alter their plans.
“People need to put it in perspective,” says Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. “There are many other diseases that are much more virulent, including influenza, measles and chicken pox.”
Unlike the flu, Zika cannot be spread through person-to-person contact. A mosquito has to bite an infected person and pass it on to someone else. The U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that travelers also may be at risk of being infected with dengue and chikungunya, two other mosquito-borne viruses.
There have been cases of the Zika virus spreading through unprotected sex from a man to his partner. As a result, the CDC is recommending the use of condoms with a male who has traveled to an affected area.
But there are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to Zika. The link between the virus and birth defects is not definitive. Four in five people who contract the virus don’t even experience symptoms, which include fever, joint pain, a rash and pink eye. Some people who do exhibit symptoms don’t do so until they return from their trips.
Symptoms typically last two to seven days. There is no vaccine to prevent Zika, nor is there medicine to treat it. Zika rarely kills, but the outbreak has coincided with increases in rates of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that can sometimes be fatal.
“We still don’t know enough about Zika to make an assessment of how bad it can get,” Glatter says.
Still, health experts are concurring with WHO and the CDC and recommending that pregnant women or women trying to get pregnant avoid traveling to places where the virus is spreading.
“If somebody is really trying hard to get pregnant, now’s not the time to be going to South America, Central America or the Caribbean,” says Christopher Ohl, an infectious disease expert at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
The CDC has issued travel notices for more than two dozen countries including Jamaica, St. Martin, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Brazil, which will play host to this summer’s Olympics, has had an increase in the number of Zika and microcephaly cases. The U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, also are affected areas.
Jack Ezon, president of luxury travel company Ovation Vacations, says that so far, his company has had 82 cancellations.
Ezon says luxury hotels are feeling the economic impact of Zika and offering promotions to encourage people to visit.
“One important thing to note is areas that are actually Zika-free are in a blanketed ‘no go’ region, which is totally harmful to economies,” he says. “For example, a small region in central Mexico has Zika and nothing in either Cancun or Cabos. That is like telling someone to flee America if there were cases in Arkansas.”
Katherine Harmon, director of health intelligence at iJET International, a risk management firm, says that travelers need not avoid the Caribbean entirely. In some areas, she says, it’s low season for mosquito-borne diseases.
If you decide to travel to affected areas, health experts recommend precautions to avoid mosquito bites, such as using bug spray, wearing light-colored clothing that covers most of your body, and sleeping under a mosquito net. Pregnant women or women trying to get pregnant should consult with their healthcare providers before taking a trip to an impacted country.
Having travel insurance could help if the policy covers the person for emergency medical, medical evacuation and trip interruption benefits, says Stan Sandberg, co-founder of TravelInsurance.com.
But travel insurance providers are not considering the CDC warning a reason to cancel a trip to an affected country, he says. Only those travelers with Cancel for Any Reason options in their policies can cancel and recoup some of their money.
So far, there have been 52 Zika cases in the USA caused by travel. But health experts don’t expect an outbreak here, mainly because mosquito containment is more effective.