The World Health Organization (WHO) published its first dedicated Blueprint on fungal disease and antifungal resistance on Wednesday 1 July, estimating that more than 300 million people suffer serious fungal disease each year1. The report says plainly that fungal disease is "largely absent from national health plans, global burden-of-disease estimates" and from mainstream antimicrobial resistance (AMR) strategy.
The blueprint sets four action domains and 12 national entry points, building on WHO's existing fungal priority pathogens list, which includes Candida auris, a drug-resistant yeast that spreads in hospitals and shrugs off first-line antifungals. Antimicrobial resistance is the broader field of pathogens surviving the drugs meant to kill them, and until now its surveillance counted only bacteria.
WHO's GLASS surveillance found in 2025 that one in six bacterial infections is now resistant, and the ten-year GAP-AMR plan adopted in May set targets for bacterial deaths alone. Fungi sat outside both. The blueprint is WHO's first attempt to name that omission and hand countries a governance scaffold for closing it.
