Arrive healthy to your program.
Each participant’s personal health and well-being is crucial to the success of the program and the health and well-being of its other participants. Each participant must, to the best of their knowledge, be fit and healthy, free of infection from COVID-19 or other communicable disease and able to travel to the program location, and able to participate fully.
Staying healthy abroad.
Wildlands Studies requires participants and instructional field staff to arrive fully to their program fully vaccinated for COVID-19, with a booster if eligible, and follow Center for Disease Control (CDC), state and country-specific guidelines for staying healthy. Wildlands Studies will not make exceptions to our COVID-19 vaccine requirement. If vaccination cannot be accomplished, participant will be required to withdraw from the program. Wildlands Studies will follow the Wildlands Studies Refund Policy if an enrolled participant is not vaccinated and withdraws in advance of the program start date.
In addition to our risk management planning, we work hard to prepare students for differences in food, water, hygiene and cultural norms in the countries we visit. However, for most programs, and especially international ones, there is no ready access to Western-style medical care. Instructors carry comprehensive, backcountry-oriented medical kits, and we ask students to bring their own basic first-aid supplies and prescription medicines. Prescription medicines should be accomplished by complete pharmacological information, available on request when you fill your prescription—this information could be indispensable in the event of an emergency.
We include more information about healthy traveling in our logistics packet, emailed to students twelve weeks in advance of the program start date, and the Student Program Manual, available online on each program’s webpage. We utilize The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the authoritative source of information on travel medicine. Visit their website (www.cdc.gov) and then navigate to the pages that discuss the country or area where your program is located. The World Health Organization (WHO) also maintains a comprehensive base of
information about disease risk.