• Clean Water
• Food and drink on holiday
• Immunisation
• Insect Bites on Holiday
• Jet Lag
• Motion sickness
• Pregnant travellers
• Safe Sex
• Sun exposure
• Taking medicine overseas
• Travel Medical Kits
• Volunteers and expeditions

Safe Sex

One of the things that your single trip travel insurance will not protect you from whilst on holiday is a sexually transmitted infection (STI). Casual sexual intercourse may or may not be on your list of things to do whilst on holiday but either way it is advisable to be prepared for safe sex by adding condoms to your list of things to take with you (condoms purchased overseas may not be as reliable). Holidays are notorious for reducing inhibitions and common sense definitely flies out the window when some alcohol is added to the mix.

Many people with STIs are unaware they are infected. The most common STI is Chlamydia. 75% of those infected don't have any symptoms and yet, left untreated, Chlamydia can affect a woman's ability to get pregnant. Chlamydia is a bacterial infection which won't go away on its own but is easily treated with antibiotics. Other curable STIs include gonorrhoea and syphilis. Again, according to the NHS, 50% of women and 10% of men with gonorrhoea don't exhibit any symptoms.

The prevalence of curable STIs in North America, Western Europe, North Africa and the middle east is estimated by the World Health Organisation to be at around the 2% mark; closer to 3% in Eastern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand; 5% in South and Southeast Asia; 7% in Latin America and the Caribbean; and 12% in Sub Saharan Africa, where gender inequality means that women cannot insist on safe sex to protect themselves. Infection rates vary enormously between countries in the same region and between urban and rural populations with higher rates in urban areas and amongst unmarried people and young adults.

Sexually transmitted viruses such as HIV and hepatitis B (HBV) cannot be treated with antibiotics. In South East Asia and the pacific basin (excluding Japan, Australia and New Zealand), Sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazon Basin, parts of the Middle East, the central Asian Republics and some countries in Eastern Europe, about 70 to 90% of the population becomes HBV-infected before the age of 40 and 8 to 20% of people are HBV carriers. Worldwide about 1 million deaths occur each year due to chronic forms of the disease and more than 350 million people in the world today are estimated to be persistently infected with HBV.

The number of people living with HIV/AIDS has risen to over 30 million and is still rising. More than 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981 and since 2008, 50% of adults living with AIDS worldwide have been women meaning that anyone can be infected with HIV. The highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS infection is in Sub-Saharan Africa (5.2%). In some parts more than one in five adults is infected. The epidemic is spreading most rapidly, however, in Eastern Europe and central Asia where the number of people living with HIV increased by 67% between 2001 and 2008.

Your 24DrTravel.com single trip travel insurance specifies that you must take reasonable care to prevent illness, and your 24DrTravel.com policy specifically exclude venereal infection from cover and it is highly unlikely that any insurer would accept liability for the consequences of unprotected sexual intercourse.