Symptoms of mild Yellow Fever

Symptoms of mild yellow fever disease, are similar to that of Malaria and include the following:

  • Fever
  • Muscle pain
  • Headache
  • Loss of appetite
  • Nausea/Vomiting

 

Symptoms of severe Yellow Fever

Most people would either be asymptomatic or have the symptoms listed above. However, a small proportion of people who contract the infection, will develop severe disease. Symptoms of severe disease include:

  • Jaundice (yellowing of skin and eyes)
  • Dark urine
  • Stomach pain
  • Vomiting
  • Bleeding from the mouth, nose, eyes and ears

 

Yellow Fever and travel

It is important that individuals travelling to yellow fever risk areas are vaccinated, as there is no specific anti -viral treatment for yellow fever. Treatment would involve symptom relief and management of liver failure or kidney failure. Although, only a small proportion of infected people get severe disease, of those that do, up to 50% of cases are likely to be fatal.

Vaccination for prevention, which provides 95- 100% immunity, is therefore the best way to ensure risk of severe disease is reduced. There are two instances where travellers are recommended vaccination:

  1. When entering risk areas
  2. To prevent the spread of yellow fever

So, there will be some countries that travellers may be entering that do not have yellow fever infection risk but the individual can cause spread within that country and therefore vaccination is required to prevent this. In such countries, travellers require an international certificate of vaccination or prophylaxis (ICVP).

Not all travel health clinics can start administering Yellow fever vaccinations, as there is stringent control. If you do want to offer YFV as part of your travel health clinic, you will need to register as a YFVC. Details of how to do this are in the next section.

Setting up as a Yellow Fever vaccination centre

Registration process details may be found here . You will need to pay an annual or biennial registration fee.

Step 1

  • Step 1: Identify a suitable person to register as a Yellow Fever vaccination centre (YFVC) administration lead. The admin lead must follow instructions for registration here

Step 2

Step 2: Identify a responsible supervising clinician (RSC) – If you have a Travel health service package with Pharmadoctor, you can get support with finding an RSC by emailing support@pharmadoctor.co.uk

Step 3

Step 3: YFVC administration lead to register as an admin centre

Step 4

Step 4: Ensure any pharmacist that will be administering the yellow fever vaccination, undergoes yellow fever vaccination training on the NaTHnaC website. Information about training, may be found here. Please note: New yellow fever centres are required to ensure that at least one vaccinator  undertakes eLearning and virtual classroom training. New yellow fever vaccinators also need to do both eLearning and virtual classroom training. All other vaccinators may do the eLearning alone. Each vaccinator needs to be enrolled onto the training by the NaTHnaC.

Remember: when you start as a YFVC you will need a stamp with your YFVC number on it and ICVP, please find full details here of requirements for the stamp and ordering process for the certificates.

 

Further information about setting up a Yellow Fever Centre can be found here

Further references

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/yellow-fever-the-green-book-chapter-35

https://travelhealthpro.org.uk/factsheet/18/yellow-fever

Yellow fever SmPC

https://www.sanofipasteur.co.uk/vaccines/stamaril