WHO GLASS

WHO GLASS (Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System) is the WHO programme that collects, standardises, and publishes antimicrobial resistance data from participating countries' national surveillance systems. Launched in 2015, GLASS provides the primary global dataset for tracking resistance trends in priority pathogens including E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Countries submit data from their national clinical laboratories, which GLASS standardises against a common protocol before publication. WHO publishes annual GLASS reports tracking resistance percentages, drug class by drug class, across participating countries. GLASS data informs WHO's Essential Medicines List, treatment guideline updates, and the global economic modelling of AMR burden.

ARILAC, the Africa CDC-EU AMR laboratory programme launched 6 May 2026 across eight African states, explicitly targets feeding African laboratory results into WHO GLASS to improve its current thin African coverage. Fewer than 20 sub-Saharan African countries contribute data to GLASS a decade after its launch, reflecting the underlying gap that only 1.3% of assessed African laboratories run routine AMR tests. The GLASS dataset is therefore structurally biased towards resistance patterns in high-income clinical settings; its global trend estimates carry wide confidence intervals over African populations, which represent a large and growing share of global antibiotic consumption. Whether ARILAC changes this depends on whether its eight participant-state laboratories achieve the WHO GLASS reporting standard within the four-year programme window.

On 1 July 2026, WHO published its first fungal disease and antifungal-resistance Blueprint, a companion surveillance framework that sits beside GLASS rather than inside it. GLASS's protocol covers bacterial pathogens only; the Blueprint is WHO's first formal acknowledgement that drug-resistant fungal infections, including Candida auris and Aspergillus, have no equivalent global surveillance mechanism. The fungal blind spot compounds GLASS's existing African coverage gap: the same under-resourced laboratories that cannot run bacterial culture and sensitivity testing are even less likely to hold fungal identification capacity, so ARILAC's four-year laboratory build-out, and any future fungal-focused successor, address only one half of the surveillance deficit the two WHO frameworks now jointly describe.