Healthcare globalization and medical tourism.

TO THE EDITOR—We read with great interest the article by Chen et al in Clinical Infectious Diseases on 15 December 2013 [1] and would like to bring some additional points to the readers’ attention. Chen et al report an increase in numbers of medical tourists from developed countries traveling overseas to obtain more affordable medical procedures and highlight the risk of unusual resistant hospital-associated infections and procedurerelated infections, in addition to endemic local infections. Wewould like to highlight the growing number of medical tourists originating from developing countries who are traveling to more developed countries to procure higher-quality or otherwise unavailable medical services. Although the area of medical tourism remains largely underresearched, there are reports of hundreds of thousands of people traveling from East Africa to India, Europe, and the United States [2, 3] seeking medical treatment every year. As economic growth of these countries increases, so too will the number of individuals traveling to acquire medical care.