Great stakes, greater purpose: MUSC travel in high-risk zones

Annually, a host of MUSC faculty, students, and staff conduct work abroad, often in high-risk regions—but some travel to countries with greater political or environmental risks.

With close support from the Center for Global Health and respective colleges, these MUSC representatives navigate travel plans to high-risk areas with caution and care, but what happens when a sudden crisis changes everything?

As part of the university’s international travel policy, MUSC faculty, staff and students must register their travel abroad via the University’s Travel Registry, an online portal administered by the Center for Global Health. A traveler’s registration is critical as it provides access to MUSC’s global assistance provider and insurance, and ensures the University can locate and communicate with travelers when responding to an emergency or critical incident abroad.

Young-Min Park, the center’s global travel safety and security coordinator, carefully reviews each student and trainee registry submission for international travel to provide guidance and recommendations based on the more high-risk locations.

Park underscores that travel registration isn't just bureaucracy—it's about protection.

"When something unexpected happens – If there is an earthquake in Tokyo or a train derailment in London – the Center needs to know if one of our people is there to reach out and make sure they are safe,” Park said.

Assessing the risk of travel

MUSC has a duty of care when sanctioning travel for students.

When considering travel to countries flagged by the U.S. Department of State as high risk, the stakes—and the preparations—are elevated. The State Department uses a four-tiered advisory system that identified the threat level of a given country, with Level 4 locations being the most at-risk.

Within each travel advisory, details of the specific on-the-ground circumstances that contribute to the guidance are shared with prospective travelers as they consider or prepare for their planned arrivals.

MUSC students seeking to travel to Level 3 or Level 4 destinations (high risk) must first be approved by the MUSC International Travel Oversight Committee, comprised of MUSC administrators and faculty to review and assess. From July 2025 to June 2025, 42 percent of student travel took place in high-risk destinations.

When traveling to high-risk locations, Park emphasizes: "Just because a place is considered high risk doesn’t mean you’ll be in danger the moment you land. You need to understand why a place is rated that way—and prepare accordingly."

An Ebola outbreak threatens PT group trip

For Cynthia Dodds, PT, Ph.D., PCS, it’s just another day at the office.

Dodds, a professor in the rehabilitation sciences department of the College of Health Professions, has traveled abroad on MUSC’s behalf for well over a decade, leading groups of physical therapy students to Masindi, Uganda (click here to view photos from her 2025 trip). MUSC has maintained a relationship with local health authorities in the southeastern country in Africa, bringing clinical care to patients along with dozens of donated equipment and medical supplies each year.

Since 2011, Dodds’ travel to Uganda was largely unencumbered. Aside from the COVID-19 pandemic, which canceled all international travel for MUSC representatives for a number of months, Dodds has made the annual trek to Africa without fail.

So it was with deep concern that in January, as she was preparing for the 2025 trip to Uganda, she was alerted of a sudden outbreak of Ebola in country. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Ebola virus disease is a severe, often fatal, illness affecting humans and other primates. The virus is transmitted to people from wild animals and then spreads in the human population through direct contact with blood, secretions or other bodily fluids, WHO reports.

An Ebola outbreak was declared on January 30, 2025, after a nurse in the capital city of Kampala, the international hub that all travel goes through, contracted the disease.“Because it was a nurse in that hospital system, the assumption was that this was a secondary infection, so it had already spread via the general population,” Park said.Travel to the country from MUSC personnel was immediately put on hold, with multiples trips from students and faculty outright canceled.

“We had a couple of other groups that were scheduled to be in Uganda in February and March, and I brought this up with the International Travel Oversight Committee and the decision was made right away that we are canceling those two trips,” Park said. “There was no way we were taking the risk of sending a dozen medical students to a country with an active Ebola outbreak.”

For authorities to declare an outbreak over, there must be 42 consecutive days without any new reported cases. Park found himself monitoring the situation daily to see how long the outbreak would block travel.

With Dodds’ group just a few months out from their planned trip, she had to balance the potential cancelation of her trip with the considerable planning work that still needed to get done for the project work, including shipping dozens of wheelchairs, walkers, crutches and other supplies.

Luckily, all of the work was not for naught, as authorities gave travelers the all-clear on April 26, a month and a half after the final reported case. In the end, Park said, there were 12 cases that sadly totaled four deaths.

Despite the weeks of not knowing whether the trip would occur, Dodds said the issue did not dampen the experience of this year’s trip for her students, and it was never brought up in conversation among locals.

“It’s just a way of life there,” she said.

Guiding future MUSC travel

The entire experience was a helpful one for Park, who’d just joined MUSC in the role in the fall 2024, but one he can also lean on in the event of future sudden events overseas that negatively affect planned MUSC travel.

For individuals seeking to visit countries that are higher up the travel advisory scale, Park advised to learn as much about the country and specifically the cities travelers plan to visit.

“Being misinformed is probably the biggest danger, no matter how safe the location is,” he said.

Dodds said with each passing year, she’s more committed to the cause.

“I've spent most of my career working with children that have really complex disabilities,” she said, “and I think I just have this positive outlook of like when things are really bad, you kind of got to try and make the world a better place.

That sounds super corny, but I think that's just the way I'm wired.”