New 10 year global action plan adopted to fight drug resistant infections
In 2021, AMR directly caused 1.14 million deaths globally, and an estimated 39 million people will die from drug-resistant infections between 2025 and 2050, roughly three deaths every minute.
What you need to know:
- Beyond the death toll, AMR makes infections harder to treat and renders other medical procedures, such as surgery, more dangerous.
- This resistance crisis threatens to undo decades of medical progress, returning us to an era when routine infections could be fatal.
Member states have endorsed a global framework to combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR), committing governments, international agencies, and the private sector to a decade-long, coordinated effort to contain one of the greatest threats to modern medicine.
During the recent 79th World Health Assembly in Geneva, the updated Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance (GAP-AMR) 2026–2036 was adopted, fulfilling a key pledge made in the 2024 United Nations General Assembly Political Declaration on AMR.
Also read: Alarm over rising antibiotic resistance
The plan requires each country to develop or update a national action plan, secure financing, strengthen surveillance systems, regulate antimicrobial use across human health, agriculture, and the environment, and report progress against agreed targets.
Countries that have not yet taken action now have a common framework to hold them accountable, while those already implementing national plans have a renewed set of benchmarks to meet over the next decade.
This comes as the scale of the crisis becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. In 2021, AMR directly caused 1.14 million deaths globally, and an estimated 39 million people will die from drug-resistant infections between 2025 and 2050, roughly three deaths every minute. Without intervention, drug-resistant infections could cause 10 million deaths annually by 2050 and push up to 28.3 million people into extreme poverty, according to the World Health Organization.
Beyond the death toll, AMR makes infections harder to treat and renders other medical procedures, such as surgery, more dangerous. This resistance crisis threatens to undo decades of medical progress, returning us to an era when routine infections could be fatal.
Low- and middle-income countries bear a disproportionate share of the burden, where weak health systems and limited access to newer drugs accelerate the spread of resistant pathogens.
Data on specific pathogens illustrates how advanced resistance has already become. Deaths due to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus more than doubled globally between 1990 and 2021, rising from 57,200 to 130,000. Among Gram-negative bacteria, which are highly resistant to antimicrobial drugs, resistance to carbapenems increased more than for any other antibiotic class over the same period, with associated deaths rising from 127,000 to 216,000.
The updated plan was developed through a consultative process led by the Quadripartite organisations: the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the United
Nations Environment Programme, the World Health Organization, and the World Organisation for Animal Health.
It builds on the original Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance (GAP-AMR), adopted in 2015, and incorporates lessons from the 2024 United Nations High-Level Meeting on Antimicrobial Resistance. The plan provides a One Health framework, grounded in the recognition that human, animal, and environmental health are inseparable, and that resistance spreads across all three.
On specific measures, delegates emphasised the importance of prevention-first interventions, including infection prevention and control, water, sanitation and hygiene, vaccination, biosecurity, and environmental measures. They also stressed the need for responsible and equitable use of antimicrobials, strengthened surveillance and innovation, and sustainable agrifood systems.
To turn this consensus into action, the plan aims to support countries in developing, implementing, and financing ambitious, multisectoral national action plans. It also reinforces accountability, monitoring, reporting, sustainable financing, and international cooperation.
