WHO GLASS
WHO's Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System; collects resistance trend data from participating countries.
Last refreshed: 7 May 2026
If Africa barely contributes to WHO GLASS, how reliable is the global AMR picture?
Timeline for WHO GLASS
Mentioned in: Africa CDC and EU launch ARILAC for AMR
Pandemics and Biosecurity- What is WHO GLASS and what does it track?
- WHO GLASS is the Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System, launched in 2015. It collects standardised resistance data from participating countries' clinical laboratories and publishes annual reports on resistance trends in priority pathogens including drug-resistant E. coli, MRSA, and gonorrhoea.Source: WHO GLASS
- Why does Africa contribute so little data to WHO GLASS?
- Fewer than 20 sub-Saharan African countries contribute to WHO GLASS a decade after its launch because most African clinical laboratories cannot run bacterial culture-and-sensitivity tests, which are the foundation of AMR surveillance. ARILAC, launched in May 2026, aims to bring eight African states up to GLASS reporting standard.Source: Africa CDC
- How does ARILAC relate to the WHO GLASS AMR database?
- ARILAC explicitly targets bringing eight African state laboratories to WHO GLASS reporting standard within four years, which would materially improve the African data coverage in GLASS and reduce the wide confidence intervals currently applied to global resistance estimates over African populations.Source: Africa CDC
Background
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.
