The Unintended Consequences of Medical Tourism

Not only is so-called “medical tourism” dangerous to the patient –it’s now dangerous to us all.

 

According to a new report, patients who travel to India and Pakistan for cheaper health care may be at risk from a new type of drug-resistant bacteria.

 

Researchers have found a gene that enables the bacteria to resist treatment with a class of antibiotics called

carbapenems in 1.9 percent of samples from patients in the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Haryana, according to the study in the journal Lancet. Reports from 37 patients in the U.K. who had the resistant strains were also analyzed, and the researchers found that most had received treatment at hospitals in India and Pakistan.

 

In the last three to four years, this kind of resistance has, according to the study, “increased dramatically in India and continues to increase … The possibility of this becoming a global problem very quickly is immense.”

 

Hospitals in the U.K. began reporting cases of patients with this type of resistance in mid-2008, said David Livermore, director of the antibiotic resistance monitoring unit at the U.K.’s Health Protection Agency. In July 2009, the London-based agency issued an alert asking doctors to look out for these resistant bacterial strains in patients who had visited hospitals in the Indian subcontinent. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention followed up with an advisory in June 2010.

In addition, medical tourists would be well advised to take their own medications with them.

 

In many places like Turkey, for instance, which is increasingly popular with medical tourists, it takes 2-4 years to register medicines available in Europe or North America.  The result is a strong possibility that in medical tourism “destination locations” the latest and most promising full range of medicines may not be available. This could have consequences prior to, during or post procedure for patients, who may have to rely on older, or less effective medicines than would be offered in North America or Europe.

 

Health Ministries and the medical tourism industry are happy to boast their countries as hot new destinations for procedures, but the ugly under-belly missed by most medical tourists (and not publicly discussed by either governments or “tourism operators”) is the all too often yawning "innovative medicines gap" between home and abroad.