I just have to drop the word "jab" into this column, and the emails flood in. That place called abroad is seen as such a perilous place that we're rightly concerned to reduce the risk to our kids.

I'd thought with hepatitis A, typhoid and yellow fever, my three-strong tribe had been pretty comprehensively covered on our Brazil trip. But Tina Leme, a Brazilian, wrote astonished that I was taking my children to her country without having them vaccinated against TB.

Some clinics advise a jab for TB on longer trips and to certain places, including South America. Zimbabwe-bound reader Alison Mortlock was told to vaccinate her one-year-old. When I checked with my health visitor, one of the at-risk countries she had listed was Portugal.

As they're all over 12 weeks, my kids will need two visits - the first for a multiple prick Heaf test, then for the jab itself. It would have been better to book early. "I've been waiting for six weeks for a referral, which is a bit of a pain because my baby was two months old when I first asked, so would have only needed a single appointment, and is now over three months, so will need two," warns reader Lorna Richardson.

Dr Jane Wilson-Howarth, co-author of Your Child's Health Abroad, had her children vaccinated at one day old. "TB is only very, very mildly contagious. You need to be in quite close contact for months and months," she says. "If you're going for less than four weeks, I wouldn't bother. But if you travel a lot, especially to developing countries, have it done as a newborn. Then it lasts for a lifetime."

Risk is always relative, and in the end it's up to us to decide. And, unfortunately there is one area of the world where TB is on the rise, and, unlike Brazil, it's somewhere we all often go on holiday. Britain.

If you have any experiences of travelling with kids that you want to share, email: travelwithkids@cs.com.