Take a steady increase in global travel and inject a mixture of new vaccines coming out to help stop smoking, lose weight and prevent cervical and other cancers, and you have the formula for a booming vaccination business.
The directors of Baltimore-based Passport Health say they have the ticket to cash in on these trends.
“We?re the Weight Watchers of travel medicine,” founder and CEO Fran Lessens said. “Just as Weight Watchers did for the diet industry, we?re doing for the vaccination industry.”
Lessens conceived of Passport in the early 1990s while working at a campus health center providing students with comprehensive immunization and travel information for semester-abroad studies. “I noticed people were traveling more and more, they weren?t getting everything they needed in one spot. Before I knew it, people were driving two hours to see me,” Lessens said.
While many internal-medicine providers offer travel immunizations, she said too often “dabblers” may not have the most up-to-date information or offer the same continuity of care as a practice dedicated to travel medicine. There are only one or two similar services in the Baltimore region.
“It changes from year to year, what is going on in one of these places,” Lessens said. “The type of malaria changes from year to year in one location. The medicine you use to treat it changes.
“We can keep people safe, not only medically, but by telling them what areas to stay away from, where not to go walking alone after dark.”
Passport administers about 60,000 shots a month, including more than 1 million doses of flu shots in a year, and takes in about $35 million a year nationwide at 145 locations.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides the latest information and advisories about diseases reported from all points on the globe. Ideally, travelers should see their specialist four to six weeks before their trip to allow the vaccines to become effective.
A lot more people are traveling, and more colleges are requiring a semester away as part of their baccalaureate requirement, Passport?s marketing director Martin Taffe said. “We?re the largest purchaser of vaccines in the country behind only the national government.”
