Nearly one in six of the microbes that cause infections now resist the antibiotics normally used against them, the World Health Organization has warned, in a finding Forbes reported as a superbug threat to routine medical care worldwide. The warning matters for medical tourism because the trade moves patients, and the superbugs they carry, across borders faster than the data on resistance can follow.
Forbes reported that the WHO tracked antibiotic resistance between 2018 and 2023 and found it climbing in more than 40 per cent of the pathogen-antibiotic pairs it monitored, at an average of 5 to 15 per cent a year. Resistance rose in “over 40 per cent of the pathogen-antibiotic combinations monitored”, the report said. The WHO named South-East Asia and the Mediterranean as the regions where the problem runs hardest, though it framed the superbug problem as a global one, spread by the movement of people rather than held back by any border.
Why the trade is exposed
Medical tourism concentrates the conditions under which superbugs travel. Patients cross borders for surgery, spend time in hospitals abroad, and fly home carrying whatever superbugs they picked up. A procedure that is routine in an accredited hospital still opens the body to infection, and an infection that no longer answers to standard antibiotics, a superbug, turns a routine case into a hard one. The risk is not tied to any single healthcare destination. It rides with the patient.
That is the part of the picture the marketing tends to skip. A hospital can hold every accreditation going and still sit inside a region such as South-East Asia and the Mediterranean, where resistance is climbing, because good use of antibiotics is a system-wide job against superbugs, not a facility-level badge. This is a clinical risk of medical tourism that no destination can advertise its way out of.
The projections and the response
The longer-term numbers are heavy. Forbes cited a study estimating that antibiotic resistance could contribute to nearly 39 million deaths by 2050, a rise of about 68 per cent. The report tied that path to an older and sicker global population, with conditions such as diabetes and heart disease leaving more people open to superbugs just as the drugs lose ground.
The single lever that slows the trend, the report said, is antibiotic stewardship: prescribing the drugs only when they are needed and taking them exactly as directed. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has set out core elements for stewardship across hospitals, clinics and home care, and patient education runs through all of them. Misuse of antibiotics for infections that do not need them speeds resistance for everyone, which is why the response has to be shared rather than local.
Some of that response is now being built in concrete. London has approved the Fleming Centre to work on antimicrobial resistance, one of the few dedicated facilities aimed at superbugs. For patients weighing treatment abroad, the resistance question folds into the wider set of risks that cross-border care carries, and it sits alongside the funding strain the WHO has flagged in its own health reporting.
The standing risk
There is a settled way to place this. Medical tourism carries clinical, legal and continuity risks, and superbugs cut across all three. It is clinical, because it changes the odds on the operating table. It is a continuity problem, because a superbug that shows up after the patient flies home lands on a health system that never saw the operation. And it defeats the usual answer to a destination’s quality question, which is accreditation, because no certificate stops a superbug from crossing a border. A destination competes on price, skill and outcomes. Superbugs are the risk that sits underneath all three and move regardless.
What to watch
Nearly one in six of the microbes that cause infections now resist standard antibiotics, and the checkable items are the ones the WHO already tracks. Whether resistance keeps climbing across the monitored pathogen-antibiotic pairs, whether South-East Asia and the Mediterranean stay the worst-hit regions, whether the 2050 projection is revised as the data improves, and whether medical tourism destinations report their infection and stewardship figures at all: those are the tests. A hospital that cannot show its resistance and stewardship data is asking patients to take the most important risk on trust.
