Approximately 21% of Switzerland’s 7.7 million population are less than 20 years of age, and 22% of Swiss residents are foreign-born. International travel has become increasingly popular worldwide. The number of families traveling with their children to and from tropical destinations has steadily increased over the last years providing potential exposures to tropical diseases. This is a global trend. Travel data of US residents from 2000 reported that 7% (1.9 million) of US international travelers were children.1 There learn more is little

published literature on the incidence and type of illness in Europe-based children who travel. The aims of this study are to characterize the profile of travel-associated illness occurring in children in Zürich, identify risk groups, and use this information as an evidence base to formulate pre-travel health advice. The Zürich

Centre of the GeoSentinel surveillance network (GeoSentinel, The Global Surveillance Network of the International Society of Travel Medicine and the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention; www.geosentinel.org) provided clinician-based find more pediatric surveillance data for this analysis during an 18-month period. The Zürich site is a composite site of the University Hospital and the University of Zürich Children’s Hospital. For the purpose of our study, patients were included if they were younger than 16 years and had sought medical advice for a presumed travel-related illness at the Emergency Room of the University of Zürich Children’s Hospital, Switzerland,

between July 2007 and December 2008. Final diagnoses were assigned by a physician. Data were collected according to a standardized, anonymous questionnaire and entered into a Structured Query Language database. The questionnaire comprises demographic data (age, sex, country of birth, country of residence, current citizenship), travel history in the last 5 years, inpatient or outpatient status, major clinical complaint (more than one per patient is possible), reason for most recent travel, and patient classification. Final diagnoses were assigned a diagnostic code from a standardized list Silibinin of >500 diagnoses, which were also categorized into 21 broad syndrome groups. Patient diagnoses were defined as follows: “diarrhea” included gastroenteritis, acute diarrhea of parasitic, viral, bacterial or unknown origin, and chronic diarrhea of unknown origin; “dermatologic”; “febrile/systemic illness”; “other gastrointestinal and genitourinary” included abdominal pain, hepatitis, pyelonephritis, appendicitis, and urinary tract infection; “injury and musculoskeletal” included trauma, fracture, arthritis, nonspecific symptoms or findings, and vertigo; “ophthalmologic”; “oral and dental”; and “respiratory” included upper and lower respiratory infections, otitis, bronchitis, and asthma.