The travelers’ diarrhea: how to avoid it and treat it

Sometimes when you travel you start to feel something strange in your stomach, and start to hear odd noises from there: Nooo, you caught the travelers’ diarrhea.

While we were travelling, we weren’t immune to these “creatures” either that make you go to the bathroom every 5 minutes and you don’t even know whether to sit or kneel down, since you can’t do both things at the same time.

Here are some suggestions to avoid catching the traveler’s diarrhea and some recommendations about how to fight with it.

How to avoid the travelers’ diarrhea 

• Always wash your hands before eating anything. If you don’t have water and soap available, you can use these sanitary napkins that are really handy.
• Clean your teeth and your face using bottled water.
• When you take a shower, close your mouth in order to avoid water coming into it and dry your face before opening your moth,
• Try not to eat vegetables that are not cooked.
• Eat usually fruit that can be peeled, like bananas or oranges, and it’s always better you peel them yourself.
• Drink from bottles and cans that haven’t been opened yet. If you don’t have bottled water, boil the tap water for 10 minutes and filter it. There are also some pills that can turn any kind of water potable.
• Never let them put ice in your drink.
• Avoid food that is not well cooked or that is prepared in restaurants that lack basic hygiene. Of course it’s hard to resist all the tasty hawker food they sell on the street (we eat street food most of the time), you just have to know that although in 90% of the cases nothing will happen to you, there’s a chance to you will end up with a night spent in the bathroom.

And if you caught it? 

• Drink as much bottled water as possible in small sips. If you have this small bags of powders to make electrolytes, they taste quite disgusting usually, but they are quite efficient. You can alternate water with juices or other drinks with sugar.
• Eat plain rice, bananas, biscuits and other dry stuff.
• If necessary, take anti-diarrhea medicines.
• If you don’t recover in a few days or you have high fever, attend a doctor as soon as possible.

This is what we do, when we get the traveler’s most frequent illness on the road. We are not doctors and these are certainly only our own  RECOMMENDATIONS based on our own experience. We hope you get to avoid this as much as possible, but you also know that diarrhea is something that is part of travelers’ life: in the end those nights you spend in the bathroom will become part of the many anecdotes of your travels around the world.

Of course, if your diarrhea doesn’t stop, you will need to attend a doctor. For those cases, of course, having a travel insurance will be essential.