Investigating antimicrobial resistance
According to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) first release of surveillance data on antibiotic resistance – Global Antimicrobial Surveillance System (GLASS) – both high- and low-income countries are experiencing high levels of resistance to a number of serious bacterial infections.
GLASS has revealed widespread occurrence of antibiotic resistance among 500,000 people, with bacterial infections across 22 countries. The most commonly reported resistant bacteria were Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus, and Streptococcus pneumoniae.
“The report confirms the serious situation of antibiotic resistance worldwide,” said Dr Marc Sprenger, Director of WHO’s Antimicrobial Resistance Secretariat. “Some of the world’s most common – and potentially most dangerous – infections are proving drug-resistant. And most worrying of all, pathogens don’t respect national borders. That’s why WHO is encouraging all countries to set up good surveillance systems for detecting drug resistance that can provide data to this global system.”
WHO is supporting more countries to set up national antimicrobial resistance surveillance systems that can produce reliable, meaningful data, and GLASS is helping to standardise the way that countries collect data, helping form a more complete picture about antimicrobial resistance patterns and trends.