PHWR Public Health Weekly Report

Objectives: As international travel rapidly rebounds, the risk of importing various infectious agents, such as malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya, and multidrug-resistant organisms, is increasing. In this study, we introduced a Travel Medicine Clinic Network as a strategy for the prevention and early detection of imported infectious diseases, compared it with international traveler-based surveillance systems, and proposed future directions.
Methods: We reviewed global surveillance networks for international travelers, such as GeoSentinel and EuroTravNet, and described the structure, data collection, and implementation of the Travel Medicine Clinic Network, which has been piloted since 2025 by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency and the Korean Society of Infectious Diseases.
Results: The network enabled the participating clinics to systematically collect standardized health information from returning travelers, thereby complementing the current, notifiable disease-based surveillance system. Compared with global networks, it has the potential to serve as a regional data collection hub in the Asia-Pacific region, where current global networks have limited coverage.
Conclusions: The network supplements existing surveillance by capturing health information from returning travelers that would otherwise remain uncollected. For effective functioning as a novel surveillance platform, sustainable operations and institutional integration are required.