Global Action Plan on AMR

The Global Action Plan on AMR (GAP-AMR) is the WHO-coordinated framework for addressing antimicrobial resistance. The second iteration, covering 2026 to 2036, was adopted at the 79th World Health Assembly (WHA79) in May 2026 and sets a headline target of cutting bacterial AMR deaths by 10% by 2035. It arrives at a moment of sharp statistical urgency: WHO's Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (GLASS) published its 2025 report in June 2026 showing that one in six bacterial infections globally no longer responds to first-line antibiotics, and that resistance rose across 40% of the pathogen-drug combinations tracked between 2018 and 2023. In South-East Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, resistance reaches one in three infections.

The original Global Action Plan on AMR was adopted at WHA68 in 2015 and established five objectives: improving awareness, strengthening surveillance, reducing infection, optimising antibiotic use, and developing new medicines. The 2026-2036 revision maintains those pillars while adding explicit accountability milestones and a financing framework designed to address the fact that surveillance capacity is scarcest precisely where resistance is highest. The GLASS report notes that low- and middle-income countries are systematically under-represented in resistance data, meaning published global figures are likely understating the true burden.

AMR is projected to cause 10 million deaths per year by 2050 on current trajectories. The GAP-AMR's 10% reduction target is therefore modest relative to the scale of the problem, and critics have noted that without mandatory reporting and enforceable antibiotic stewardship standards, the plan risks repeating the pattern of the 2015 framework: strong rhetoric, patchy implementation.

On 1 July 2026 WHO published its first fungal disease and antifungal-resistance Blueprint, explicitly naming the fungal resistance gap that the bacterial-only GAP-AMR does not cover. The Blueprint does not replace GAP-AMR; it sits beside it as a companion strategy, meaning WHO's AMR architecture is now split between the bacterial plan adopted at WHA79 and a newly launched fungal strategy with its own, separate funding ask.