Gap year students or "gappers" are working so hard to raise money for the coming year that they often forget, or don’t want to ‘waste’ money on, their vaccinations. Parents have to interfere.

The reputation of the gap year may be tarnished by the rich kids whose parents dole out £25-30,000 to conduct a year-long international networking party, but one thing remains the same. Virtually all gappers will visit areas where malaria and dengue fever is endemic, and diseases like Yellow fever, cholera and hepatitis lurk. Almost all are potential killers.

What’s more, some countries won’t let you across their borders without proof of the correct jabs. Gappers need to get their jabs and carry their vaccination certificates with them.

Some gappers simply don’t get round to it in the same way that they don’t get round to buying insurance. In both cases the failure is not simply down to indolence on their parts. Raising a huge lump of money for a gap year isn’t easy – why spend it on health stuff (and indeed insurance) when you are financially stretched? Also, every gapper thinks that he or she is invulnerable and bad stuff only happens to daft people (i.e. not them).

This is why parents have to step in and take the offspring to a GP or specialist clinic to get all the health issues sorted. Giving Gappers the money and telling them to sort it out themselves rarely works.

Timing is also crucial. They may need to have jabs or start a course of malaria prophylactics a couple of months before travelling. And, at this time of year in particular, you can’t always get an appointment right away.

I reckon it’s best to begin by researching the travel health sites listed, below, and then making an appointment with your local surgery, assuming the practice includes a vaccination clinic. Even so check out the prices at your local surgery against the rest because the NHS is not always the cheapest and, yes, it does always charge for travel health preparation.

Masta has its own clinics and so does Nomad which specialises in kitting people out for adventurous travel – they look after Royal Geographical Society expeditions for instance.

For up to date travel information and sound advice, several health professionals I spoke to recommend Masta. I found Masta’s site cumbersome but Fit for Travel , an NHS site, was much easier to use with at-a-glance maps showing the risks of various diseases throughout the world (although as I drifted through the site I noticed that 254 cases of Chikungunya have been reported in Italy, one of my favourite destinations).

The World Health Organisation’s site brought on similar fits of agoraophobia with news of cholera outbreaks in Iraq, and Ebola in the Congo. The WHO site is good for up-to-date information about prevalent diseases throughout the world. The Government’s Gap year advice is good both medically and more generally – it includes a saluatory story about someone taking photographs of police in a less-than-understanding area of East Africa, the lesson being that police can be very sensitive about pictures.

The National Travel Health Network and Centre, NaTHNaC, has good basic travel health information plus telephone numbers for tropical medecine hospitals. The American site, Centers for Disease Control Prevention is user friendly and informative.

A lot of these sites sell ready-made health kits with everything from plasters to pain killers but I reckon that gappers are better off making their own kits just so long as they take one and pack it into a waterproof container. The health kit is another area where your local GP might be a helpful source of advice.

Once abroad gappers should keep this link to Travel Health which lists international health clinics. And if you want your gappers to be scared into travel health preparations, get them to have a look at Great Gap Years. I thought the picture showed a generic gapper beside someone dressed as a microbe. I think that the microbe is supposed to be a 'health worker', but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Finally, don’t forget condoms. Any parent who is completely certain that their gapper won’t do it before marriage needs to take a reality check. So what if the condoms return un-used? You will only have proved yourself right.

Times recommends

• New York's top 10 new hotels
• A Scottish monastery retreat
• Welcome back to Rwanda