WHO Blueprint on fungal disease and antifungal resistance

WHO published its first dedicated Blueprint on fungal disease and antifungal resistance on 1 July 2026, estimating that more than 300 million people suffer serious fungal disease every year while the problem stays largely absent from national health plans and mainstream antimicrobial resistance strategy. The Blueprint sets out four action domains and 12 national entry points intended to give ministries of health a concrete starting point rather than a general call to attention.

It sits alongside the architecture WHO already runs for bacterial resistance, including the Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System and the Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance, and it builds directly on WHO's existing fungal priority pathogens list, which names Candida auris among the pathogens in its critical tier. Fungal pathogens have historically sat outside that bacterial-focused AMR machinery, tracked unevenly if at all.

The Blueprint's central argument is that fungal disease has been missing from burden estimates and national plans for long enough that health systems routinely underinvest in fungal diagnostics and surveillance. By giving fungal pathogens their own action domains and entry points, WHO is asking national authorities to fold fungal disease into AMR planning on the same footing as bacterial resistance, rather than treating it as a niche concern for specialist mycology units.