Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 14th of May.

And that means everyone is moving into summer holiday mood, which means it's a great time to talk to one of my favorite travel people.

She is Dr. Jane Wilson Howarth. She has written the definitive books on travel medicine,

and it is a subject that she is as keen on and as sharp on as ever.

Very nice to talk to you again, Jane.

Anybody who's planning, for instance, just to go to the Mediterranean,

anything they need to know on the travel health front? Presumably not. We're all quite good at travelling there, aren't we? Well, I'm not so sure, really. I think that's a big pitfall, isn't it? You're going somewhere familiar. You think, you know, where you're going, and you don't think about health. I had an email from a friend recently. We were talking about, she was asking about mosquito avoidance.

And she said, I don't have any problems in mosquitoes because I take the vitamin B.

And I thought, O flip, this is a friend of mine, and she doesn't know that although that reduces

itching, it doesn't actually stop you being bitten.

So perhaps for the med, that would be good enough. But with global warming and all that,

there are things that will give you nasty diseases. So I'd rather use some chemicals on my skin

rather than in my body. The itch at night is horrible, isn't it? You're wanting to get snuggled

up in bed and then there's this itch that drives you a bit bonkers. I usually travel with some satirazine, which is a good non-drowsy

antistamine that lasts for 24 hours, so you don't even have to take it. Quite good stuff.

So this is mosquitoes in Europe around the Mediterranean, but you've written that the mosquito kills more people than any

other creature. Can you explain that? Because it's a bearer of a whole plethora of diseases,

everyone knows about malaria, of course, but we've got Zika now and chicken gunya and the more

tropical you go, the more careful you've got to be.

And I suppose if people are going tropical, they often don't wear all that many clothes.

They like to strip off and get a suntan, lots of exposed skin, which really, you can imagine the mosquitoes are thinking, oh, yummy.

There's a product called EX4, which I think is permatherin-based,

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