SECTORS of the Australian medical profession will use any issue to attack medical tourism to India and Thailand, says a spokesman for Phuket International Hospital, where medical tourism is flourishing.

Peter Davison, Manager of International Services at the Phuket hospital, was commenting on a report that claimed patients travelling overseas for surgery were putting the Australian health system ''at risk from deadly superbugs.''

Phuket International Hospital and other Phuket hospitals are attracting more patients from Australia, especially for cosmetic surgery. Phuket International is also pioneering IVF gender selection treatment.

A report online at the watoday.com.au site quoted the director of infectious diseases at the Austin Hospital, Lindsay Grayson, who said many Australians had returned from overseas surgery ''extremely ill because they received poor care and picked up foreign superbugs - organisms resistant to antibiotics.''

According to Professor Grayson, the emergence of a new superbug known as NDM-1 - which originated in India and has been found in several Australian patients who had travelled overseas - was ''genuinely scary.''

Unlike other bugs, it could proliferate and colonise other healthy gut flora inside people's intestines, making them resistant to antibiotics.

Peter Collignon, director of the infectious diseases unit and microbiology at Australian National University, went one step further.

He said the threat from NDM-1 was so great that Australian hospitals should be made to isolate returning 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 told watoday.

On Phuket, Mr Davison said the isolation proposal did not relate directly to medical tourism.

''Anyone who has had any form of surgery or invasive procedure in an Indian hospital could be a carrier of the new superbug and bring it into Australia,'' he said.

The quarantine factor could be applied to ''every tourist from any nationality who has been to an Indian hospital because of an accident, appendicitis, etc., as well as every Indian national who has also had recent surgery.

''It seems to me that anyone who has had any form of surgery or invasive procedure in an Indian hospital could be a carrier of the new superbug and bring it into Australia.

''Thats a lot of people to identify and isolate, and the majority are not medical tourists at all.''

Global Health Travel managing director Cassandra Italia told watoday that her company flew about 40 Australian patients a month to countries such as India, Thailand and South Korea.

Ms Italia said gender-selection IVF procedures were booming in Thailand because of a ban - for non-medical reasons - in Australia. Knee and hip replacements were increasingly popular among those not willing to wait six to 12 months for the procedures in the Australian public hospital system.

Central Queensland University economics lecturer Anita Medhekar, who is doing a PhD on the economics of medical tourism, said the industry was worth about $A2 billion a year in India alone.

She said top hospitals in Thailand and India were offering surgery for less than a third of the price charged in Western countries, describing it as a win-win for patients and developing countries.