ИСТИНА

Travel, besides being a source of new experiences and cultural enrichment, can be dangerous to the travelers’health. It should be taken into consideration while planning different touristic activities and must be kept in mind when evaluating the region’s recreational potential, as well as for improving travel and recreation in the country. Russia, an enormous country almost completely located within temperate latitudes, has a broad spectrum of natural landscapes which attract incre asing numbers of tourists. Infectious and parasitic diseases play a leading role among the health problems that tourists face while traveling. Among the multitude of infectious diseases that can endanger travelers, natural-focal diseases, whose agents and/or carriers are integral to natural landscapes, are especially prominent. Recent rapid development of new forms of tourism, such as eco-tourism, ethnographical trips, gastronomical tourism, etc., raises the risk of infection. Some of the results of the study of natural-focal infections and parasitoses, which are necessary to evaluate the recreational and travel potential of the Russian Federation, are presented and discussed in this presentation. A cartographical and statistical analysis of infectious and parasitic natural-focal diseases, spanning more than a decade (1997-2013), is the basis of this study. A series of original analytical, integrated,and synthetic maps showing disease incidence in the population at both the national and regional levels were analyzed to estimate the risk of a disease manifestation in travelers in a given region. The results of this study may be useful both for individual tourists planning trips to Russia and tour agencies organizing tour groups, as well as for health advisers and medical workers