The World Health Organization (WHO) published its 2025 Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (GLASS) report drawing on 23 million laboratory-confirmed bacterial infections across 104 countries in 20231. GLASS pools resistance data from national laboratories to track global trends. The headline finding: one in six of those infections no longer responds to the antibiotic a doctor would reach for first, and resistance rose in 40% of the pathogen-drug combinations WHO tracks between 2018 and 2023.
In WHO's South-East Asia and Eastern Mediterranean regions, one in three common infections is now drug-resistant; in Europe the rate is one in ten, in Africa one in five2. For an individual patient, resistance means the first prescription fails more often, pushing treatment onto second-line drugs that are costlier, more toxic and scarcer in exactly the settings already struggling.
The measurement itself carries the warning. GLASS counts only laboratory-confirmed infections, so its figures are anchored to wherever lab capacity exists. Because resistance is highest where surveillance is thinnest, the true rate in under-resourced systems is systematically undercounted, which means the report understates the burden rather than overstating it. This is the slow pandemic the Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance adopted at the World Health Assembly last month is meant to bend, targeting a 10% cut in resistance deaths by 2030, and the one the Food and Agriculture Organization has costed at $318bn in livestock losses by 2040 if left unchecked.
