Lin H. Chen, MD, FACP, FASTMH, FISTM

Travel history has a profound and essential role for the infectious disease clinician and for promoting public health priorities. The patient’s lifetime of geographic exposures, and especially those in the most recent few months, will determine what potential diagnoses are included in the differential diagnosis, whether caring for a patient with a fever, a skin lesion, a pulmonary infiltrate, focal neurologic lesion or other problem. A person’s geographic exposure profile must be combined with the clinician’s knowledge (or access to information) about clinical presentations, incubation periods, frequency of occurrence, and geographic distribution of dozens of common and a few hundred uncommon infections.