This opus could equally well be entitled How to Scare Yourself Witless Before Setting Off On Your Holidays. In almost 300 chunky pages, which only the beefiest backpacker will want to carry abroad with him, Michael Wright takes us on a thrills and spills tour of the most appalling diseases on the planet, including some that are very unlikely ever to befall the western traveller: Chagas disease, plague, polio and lymphatic filiariasis really are not big risks for those just passing through affected areas.

While nasty diseases are only part of this comprehensive volume, they seem to dominate. Health hazards, for instance, include biting and stinging insects - take in malaria, African sleeping sickness and leishmaniasis - which all also have their own pages. It's interesting that the book has been fact-checked, it states, not by any old travel clinic, but the one at London's Hospital for Tropical Diseases.

But besides diseases, there are plenty of other dangers to keep you from sleeping at night, from heat illness to cold exposure, from contaminated cutlery to charging buffalo. Even so, my main complaint is not so much the somewhat alarmist content, but the hackles-raising style - a sort of mildly patronising bonhomie: 'It's a bore to wear a seat belt... But (without wanting to sound like a road safety campaign) you do, I'm sure, know that it makes sense.'

The regional profiles, with lists of useful numbers for the main countries that travellers are likely to visit, are useful. I'm not sure about the 'sex safety' details in each one, though. Is there really any need to compare the rate of HIV/Aids infections in each part of the world before recommending every time 'always practise safer sex'? The numbers are irrelevant - the advice applies everywhere on the planet, including the UK. And the mention that 'more women than men have HIV' in Africa almost implies that sex with men is safer. And that would be a dangerous assumption!