WHO's GLASS 2025 Report on AMR | 20 Nov 2025

Source: TH

Why in News?

The World Health Organization (WHO) released its Global Antibiotic Resistance Surveillance Report (GLASS) 2025, highlighting that India has one of the highest antimicrobial resistance (AMR) rates globally, with 1 in 3 bacterial infections resistant to common antibiotics.

What are the Key Findings of the GLASS 2025 Report?

• Rising AMR Threat: Between 2018 and 2023, AMR increased in 40% of monitored pathogen-antibiotic combinations, notably against critical “Watch” antibiotics like carbapenems and fluoroquinolones.
• Geographically Uneven AMR: AMR was highest in Southeast Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, followed by Africa, while Europe and the Western Pacific show lower rates.
• AMR Threat in India: In 2023, India, with one of the highest AMR rates, had 1 in 3 bacterial infections resistant to common antibiotics, with ICU infections by E. coli, K. pneumoniae, and S. aureus highly resistant.

What is Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR)?

• About: AMR is a phenomenon where bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites evolve over time and no longer respond to medicines (like antibiotics, antivirals, and antifungals) designed to kill them.
• AMR as a Health Threats:
  • Pandemic-Level Risk: AMR makes infections harder to treat, increasing the difficulty of managing common illnesses and making medical procedures, such as surgeries, significantly riskier. 
    • According to the World Bank, by 2050, unchecked AMR could cause economic damage comparable to the 2008 financial crisis.
  • Untreatable Infections: Common infections (like pneumonia, tuberculosis, and sepsis) could become fatal. 
    • Bacterial AMR was directly responsible for 1.27 million deaths (in 2019) and contributed to nearly five million deaths worldwide.
  • End of Modern Medicine: Routine procedures (like surgery, chemotherapy, and organ transplants) become high-risk due to untreatable infections.

What are Driving Factors Behind the Rise of Antimicrobial Resistance in India?

• Excessive Antibiotic Usage: Widespread antibiotics misuse in India—including over-the-counter sales, self-medication, and incomplete treatments—fuels AMR, with 59% of 2022 use from WHO’s “Watch” category for serious infections. 
• Poor Healthcare System: Limited diagnostics, weak regulatory enforcement and unevenness across states, along with overcrowded hospitals and poor hygiene, fuel empirical antibiotic use and spread resistant pathogens.
• Stagnation in Antibiotic Development: Nafithromycin (2024) is the first new antibiotic in its class in over 30 years, as pharmaceutical companies prioritized profitable chronic disease treatments, limiting options against resistant pathogens.
• Pervasive Non-Human Applications: India is the world’s 4th-largest consumer of animal antimicrobials, with use in animal feed projected to rise 82% by 2030. 
  • Indiscriminate use in agriculture and aquaculture spreads resistant genes into the food chain worsening AMR.
• Environmental Contamination: Environmental contamination from pharma waste and untreated hospital effluents, combined with poor sewage and waste management, creates hotspots that promote the development and spread of AMR. 

What Measures can India Take to Curb the Rise of AMR?

• Mandate Hospital Stewardship: India can curb AMR by implementing AMSPs, auditing prescriptions, training healthcare staff, adopting digital prescribing tools, and encouraging rapid diagnostics.
  • Scale up Indian Council of Medical Research’s AMR Surveillance Network, use genomic sequencing, and align with GLASS for standardized data on AMR.
• Curb Over-the-Counter Sales: Enforce Schedule H1 (restricts sale of certain antibiotics without prescription), track antibiotic sales digitally, inspect pharmacies, and run public awareness campaigns on self-medication risks.
• Strict implementations of Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, 1945: Ban antibiotics as growth promoters, set up agricultural antibiotic surveillance, and promote alternatives like probiotics.
• Control Pharmaceutical Pollution: Mandate advanced wastewater treatment, promote green pharmacy certification, set industry best practices, and fund effluent treatment research.

Conclusion

India's AMR crisis spans humans, animals, and environment; tackling it requires stewardship, regulation, environmental controls, surveillance, public awareness, and alignment with GLASS and One Health.