Russia travel health
Required is not recommended: the first is what the border asks about, the second is what a clinic would suggest. Both, for Russia, then the number to dial and what care costs a visitor. Applies to every guide in Russia: Moscow, St Petersburg, Lake Baikal, Kamchatka, Vladivostok.
Required to enter
Nothing. No vaccination certificate is asked for at the border.
Recommended
- Routine vaccinations up to date
- Tick-borne encephalitis if you will be in forest or countryside between spring and autumn — this is a genuine risk across Siberia and the Far East
- Hepatitis A
- Rabies for remote or long stays
Emergency number
112, or 103 for an ambulance
Care for visitors
Good but costly
State hospitals treat emergencies, and the standard varies enormously between Moscow and the regions. Private clinics in Moscow and St Petersburg are good and take cash. The complication is not medical: many Western insurers no longer cover travel to Russia at all, and card payment does not work, so a serious problem has to be paid for in cash or arranged from home.
Ticks in forest across Siberia and the Far East from May to July carry encephalitis, and the vaccination course takes weeks — start it early. Cold is the other one: −20°C is an ordinary winter day in Irkutsk and frostbite happens fast in wind. In Kamchatka the hazards are bears, volcanic ground and weather that strands people for days.
The general rules — clinic timing, water, mosquitoes, insurance — are in travel health tips.
The guides in Russia
MoscowRussiaRed Square, marble metro halls, and a city that runs to the second
St PetersburgRussiaCanals, the Hermitage, and a month of nights that never get dark
Lake BaikalRussiaA fifth of the world’s unfrozen fresh water, and in March you can walk on it
KamchatkaRussiaThirty active volcanoes, brown bears fishing, and no road to the rest of the country
VladivostokRussiaRussia’s Pacific city, closer to Tokyo than to Moscow, at the end of the railway