The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that antibiotic resistance is accelerating at a concerning pace, faster than medical science can respond, and posing serious threat to global health.
A new ‘Global antibiotic resistance surveillance report 2025’ launched by WHO on Monday showed that one in six laboratory-confirmed bacterial infections causing common infections in people worldwide in 2023 were resistant to antibiotic treatments.
Between 2018 and 2023, it found that antibiotic resistance rose in over 40 percent of the pathogen, antibiotic combinations monitored, with an average annual increase of 5–15 percent.
Data reported to the WHO Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System (GLASS) from over 100 countries cautioned that increasing resistance to essential antibiotics poses a growing threat to global health.
The new report presents for the first time, resistance prevalence estimates across 22 antibiotics used to treat infections of the urinary and gastrointestinal tracts, the bloodstream and those used to treat gonorrhoea.
WHO estimates that antibiotic resistance is highest in the WHO South-East Asian and Eastern Mediterranean Regions, where 1 in 3 reported infections were resistant. In the African Region, 1 in 5 infections was resistant. It added that resistance is also more common and worsening in places where health systems lack capacity to diagnose or treat bacterial pathogens.
“Antimicrobial resistance is outpacing advances in modern medicine, threatening the health of families worldwide,” Tedros Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general said.
“As countries strengthen their AMR surveillance systems, we must use antibiotics responsibly, and make sure everyone has access to the right medicines, quality-assured diagnostics, and vaccines. Our future also depends on strengthening systems to prevent, diagnose and treat infections and on innovating with next-generation antibiotics and rapid point-of-care molecular tests”, he added.
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The new report noted that drug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria are becoming more dangerous worldwide, with the greatest burden falling on countries least equipped to respond.
The global health body therefore called on all countries to report high-quality data on AMR and antimicrobial use to GLASS by 2030,noting that achieving the target will require concerted action to strengthen the quality, geographic coverage, and sharing of AMR surveillance data to track progress.
WHO also urged countries to scale up coordinated interventions designed to address antimicrobial resistance across all levels of healthcare and ensure that treatment guidelines and essential medicines lists align with local resistance patterns.
