AMR

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is the process by which bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites evolve to survive exposure to the medicines designed to kill them. Drug-resistant bacteria are the most clinically urgent dimension: resistant strains of common pathogens including E. coli, Klebsiella, tuberculosis, gonorrhoea, and Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) are now responsible for an estimated 1.27 million deaths annually worldwide attributable directly to AMR, a figure the World Bank projects will rise sharply without coordinated surveillance and stewardship. AMR is driven by antibiotic overuse and misuse in both clinical and agricultural settings, environmental contamination through pharmaceutical manufacturing effluent, and inadequate infection-prevention infrastructure in healthcare facilities.

ARILAC, the four-year Africa CDC-EU laboratory capacity programme launched in Addis Ababa on 6 May 2026, targets the AMR surveillance gap directly: of more than 50,000 medical laboratories assessed across 14 African countries, only 1.3% conduct routine AMR testing, leaving 261 million people without access to resistance diagnostics. Without that testing, prescribers cannot distinguish sensitive from resistant pathogens, antibiotic stewardship cannot be enforced, and AMR data cannot feed back into treatment guidelines or into WHO GLASS, the global AMR surveillance system. AMR was also identified as a cross-cutting biosecurity threat in the WHO R&D Blueprint Q1 2026 pathogen roadmaps, though unlike influenza or filoviruses, it has no single vaccine-targetable antigen, making laboratory capacity and stewardship the primary intervention tools.