Travel medicine
The category where the medicine is needed before the trip, not after
Everything else in this catalogue treats something that has already happened. Here most of it is prevention, and that changes what the label is for: it sets a schedule that starts days before departure and continues after the return, and a course taken from the middle of that schedule is not the course that was approved.
This is also the one category where a medicine intended for healthy people carries a boxed warning. Mefloquine has one, about neuropsychiatric reactions that can persist after the medicine is stopped, and it is the reason the choice between antimalarials is a conversation and not a preference.
Medicines
Travel medicine
- Atovaquone and proguanilMalaroneThe malaria tablet with the shortest schedule around the trip, approved both to prevent falciparum malaria and to treat it.Prescription only
- MefloquineLariamA weekly malaria tablet, and the one medicine for healthy travellers in this catalogue that carries a boxed warning.Prescription only
- AcetazolamideDiamoxA tablet for acute mountain sickness, approved for climbers going up fast and for those who react badly to altitude even on a gradual ascent.Prescription only
- RifaximinXifaxan, NormixAn antibiotic that stays in the gut, approved for travellers diarrhoea caused by E. coli and explicitly not for diarrhoea with fever or blood.Prescription only
Written by us
How to get it legally
All four are prescription only across Europe, and here the timing is part of the prescription: a course that has to start a week before departure cannot be organised on the last evening. That makes travel one of the better uses of an online consultation, because it is planned rather than urgent.
What a remote service cannot do is choose the antimalarial for you. Which one fits depends on where you are going, on drug resistance in that specific region, on pregnancy, on epilepsy and on psychiatric history, and the resistance picture changes over time. Doxycycline, which also has a place in malaria prevention, sits in the sexual health section of this catalogue because that is where its other approvals are.