Travel Health

Dr. Jane Wilson-Howarth BSc (hons), MSc (Oxon), BM, DCH, DCCH, DFSRH, FRSTM&H, FFTM RCPS (Glasg)

Nepal has had a huge influence on Jane Wilson-Howarth’s life and career. She first visited the Himalayan region when she organised an overland expedition to explore caves and catalogue the animals inside. Part of the work involved collecting samples from bats and also investigating the cave disease histoplasmosis. During this six-month trip Jane realised the huge potential there was in improving peoples’ lives and reducing the burden of disease through health education.

She returned to England to study parasite control and was then accepted at Southampton University on a course leading to a bachelor of medicine qualification. While still a student, she squeezed in a piece of work with Save the Children in Ladakh where she worked to eradicate parasites from children; she also helped with roving clinics in the harsh mountains where maximum winter daytime temperatures reached just -11 degrees Celsius. Some of the villages the team visited on foot, with horses carrying tin trunks full of medicines, were beyond a 17,000ft pass.

After qualifying as a doctor of medicine, Jane continued to seek out work in resource-poor settings, and returned with her family to Nepal to work on child survival projects with various development agencies. She also helped design health education material for WaterAid and volunteered at a free clinic for street people near Bouda, Kathmandu. That time, she lived in Nepal for six years, including a couple of years on Rajapur, an island in the largest tributary of the Ganges, close to the Royal Bardiya Reserve.

Jane has written three travel health guides and two travel narratives. She lectures extensively on travel health and writes for Wanderlust magazine and on occasion for the Independent, the Guardian and many other publications. Jane’s author website is at www.wilson-howarth.com

These days she works as a general practitioner and is medical director of the Travel Clinic in Cambridge and Ipswich. She continues to teach on Engineers without Borders workshops, at Cambridge and Cranfield Universities and once a year at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.