At least 12 people were reported dead in Matamoros, Mexico, after contracting a deadly fungal infection while undergoing cosmetic surgeries for their breasts and butts.
The individuals succumbed to a deadly meningitis outbreak in which the fungus, post-op, ate through their blood vessels and attacked their brains. All of them had just prior to dying received breast implants or butt lifts.
All in all, some 24 people were affected by the outbreak, the other 12 cases occurring in the United States, including in Texas. It turns out a contaminated injection introduced the fungus into their spines.
“What we ended up seeing is, literally, this fungus eating through blood vessels and causing clotting as well,” said Dr. Louis Ostrosky of UTHealth Houston in a statement to the media.
Meningitis is a type of infection that affects the protective tissue surrounding the brain and spinal cord. It can cause deadly sepsis and result in permanent brain damage, usually affecting babies, young children, teenagers and young adults.
Symptoms of meningitis include fever, headache, rash, stiff neck, sensitivity to bright light, drowsiness, seizure and general feelings of malaise and sickness.
Rise in medical tourism
In this outbreak, all of the infections occurred in “young, otherwise healthy patients” who had traveled from the U.S. to two different clinics in Tamaulipas, as well as to other parts of Mexico for “medical tourism,” meaning they traveled to Mexico to receive treatments that more than likely are much less expensive down there.
In every meningitis case, the affected patient received epidural anesthesia, an injectable pain medication that is administered prior to surgery. All cases occurred between January and May of last year.
Nine of the 12 patients, or 69 percent, ended up dying from the resulting meningitis infection that occurred post-op.
While such an outbreak is unusual, it will likely not be the last caused by epidurals administered during medical tourism.
“This is probably not our last fungal outbreak,” Dr. Ostrosky said.
Because medical care in the U.S. is prohibitively expensive for most people, it is becoming increasingly popular for Americans to travel to Mexico and other countries like Turkey and Thailand that offer the same procedures for far less money.
Medical tourism to Mexico is also popular among Americans who are in search of alternative treatments for diseases like cancer that are not legally available in the U.S. due to restrictions by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
According to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), this latest meningitis outbreak was caused by a fungus called Fusarim solani. On average, each affected patient developed symptoms about 39 days after surgery.
“The key issue with any form of surgery is safety,” says Prof. Omar Khan, a consultant bariatric surgeon at Ashtead Hospital in Surrey, United Kingdom.
“For patients travelling abroad for weight loss surgery, there may be real question marks over the quality of pre-operative assessment and the lack of follow-up care offered to these patients.”
Khan says that most complications occur about two weeks after surgery, in the case of gastric bypass surgery, which is another procedure that patients from “first-world” countries like the United Kingdom often travel elsewhere for to save money.
“Anyone post-surgery must be able to be reviewed and treated by their surgeon, especially in the event of complications,” Khan warns. “Not only this, but these patients do require long-term follow-up, and someone to coordinate their care in the longer term – all things that are absent in patients undergoing surgery abroad.”
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