Medical tourists are a health risk, experts warn
A GROWING number of patients travelling overseas for surgery are putting themselves and the Australian health system at risk from deadly superbugs, infectious disease experts say.
Medical tourism companies say more people are choosing to have serious surgery overseas in a shift from the cheap, cosmetic procedures the industry has traditionally performed, The Age newspaper reports.
Global Health Travel managing director Cassandra Italia said her company flew about 40 Australian patients a month to countries such as India, Thailand and South Korea for treatments.
”In the last year and half, we’ve seen about a 70 percent increase in people coming to us just because they don’t want to sit on waiting lists,” she told The Age.
But the trend has alarmed experts. Austin Hospital’s director of infectious diseases, Lindsay Grayson, said many Australians had returned from overseas surgery extremely ill because they received poor care and picked up foreign superbugs – organisms resistant to antibiotics.
Peter Collignon, director of the infectious diseases unit and microbiology at Australian National University, said the threat from the superbug NDM-1 was so great that Australian hospitals should be made to isolate return medical tourists until they know they are not carrying superbugs that could contaminate hospitals.
”These people are risking bringing superbugs into our hospitals and that increases the risks for everyone else,” he said.
Ian Jarrett
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