Medical tourism is increasing owing to high costs of care, lack of availability or long waits for procedures, and improvements in technology and standards of care in many countries. Transplant tourism is one example of medical tourism that has been attracting increasing attention because of concerns over poor treatment and outcomes of both donors and recipients. Most such cases involve vended kidneys obtained from vulnerable populations, and both donors and recipients receive inferior care by US standards. This commentary discusses a paper by Gill et al. that compared outcomes of 33 transplant tourists with those of patients transplanted at a US center. Fewer complications and better outcomes were seen in patients transplanted in the US center than among transplant tourists. Large transplant centers with long waiting times are increasingly likely to see patients return newly transplanted from overseas; such patients require urgent attention, with particular consideration to infectious complications. © 2009 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

Kidney transplantation Medical tourism Graft survival Transplant tourism Organ trafficking

graft survival Treatment Outcome medical ethics priority journal health care cost Note ethnicity medical practice tourism commercial phenomena organ donor follow up kidney graft rejection human postoperative infection kidney failure Kidney Transplantation