Increasing Drug-Resistant Infections From Suboptimal Medical Tourism Practices

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) recently announced the need to strengthen prevention protocols in response to increased global medical tourism. Such strategies are used to detect and protect against antimicrobial-resistant outbreaks.

Medical tourism describes the practice of patients seeking medical treatment by traveling abroad, typically for aesthetic and cosmetic procedures. PAHO has estimated that the number of U.S. residents that sought medical procedures internationally increased drastically from 750,000 to 1.4 million people within a ten-year period.

PAHO’s announcement on medical tourism came as a direct result to the multinational fungal meningitis outbreak in two Mexican clinics, which affected 35 U.S. residents and has since shown a high mortality rate. Similarly, in 2019, 38 U.S. residents who had traveled to Tijuana, Mexico for bariatric surgery were affected by a multi-drug resistant strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, primarily affecting the surgical site. Infections like such are notably difficult to treat with medications; when these outbreaks show drug-resiliency, the odds of survival diminishes significantly.

Suboptimal sanitation practices in these international clinics are associated with increased risk of complications, the most common being surgical wound infections and bacteremia, which means bacteria in the blood. Malpractices linked to (including but not limited to) the reuse of syringes, insufficient sanitation methods, and incorrect antibiotics prescriptions have set off red flags, causing PAHO to warn the public of the risks associated with medical tourism.

The recent increase in drug-resistant microbial outbreaks may also be due to growing motivation to obtain medical procedures abroad. The incentives for doing so include lower costs, decreased waiting and scheduling time, and access to operations unavailable at home.

By Maya Yorks