Enhancing Global AMR Strategies: Balancing Equity and Data-Driven Decisions

A recent call urges an updated Global Action Plan that expands pathogen coverage to parasitic and viral agents, centers equity, and builds interoperable data systems, addressing a clinical landscape now marked by increasingly complex resistant organisms that complicate surveillance and therapeutic choice.

Surveillance and stewardship priorities must shift: the existing framework has emphasized bacterial and fungal threats, but adding parasitic and viral resistance changes sampling frames, laboratory workflows, and reporting requirements. The call recommends revising the Global Action Plan on AMR to reflect inclusive pathogen coverage and clear data-governance standards. National programs will need to expand sentinel surveillance, update laboratory capacity and training, and revise reporting pipelines to operationalize that change.

Equity gaps carry clinical consequences: uneven surveillance, limited diagnostics, workforce shortages, and chronic funding shortfalls leave low-resource settings blind to emerging resistance patterns. National levers should include targeted budget lines for AMR surveillance, integration of AMR into universal health coverage and essential-medicines frameworks, regulatory harmonization for diagnostics and therapeutics, and investment in regional laboratory networks to pool expertise and reduce duplication.

Closing these gaps will enable earlier detection and more appropriate treatment choices, improving outcomes and system resilience.

Standardized, interoperable databases for genomic and phenotypic resistance data enable more rapid cross-border tracking and policy response without prescribing a single technical solution. AMI recommends building accessible repositories for nucleotide sequences and linked metadata, known here as AMR gene sequencing, to guide surveillance funding and support real-time analytics for outbreak detection.

Funding for low-resource settings should prioritize hub-and-spoke laboratory models, capacity-building grants for workforce and bioinformatics, incentives for data sharing, and sustainable maintenance to secure long-term utility—measures that shorten detection timelines and enable targeted interventions.

Clinicians, public-health leads, and policymakers should move the revised plan into practice now, with defined operational steps and funding pathways to ensure timely, locally relevant susceptibility data inform treatment.

Key Takeaways

• Expanded scope emphasizing equity and genomics-driven surveillance to capture parasitic, viral, bacterial, and fungal resistance.
• Low- and middle-income countries, regional laboratory networks, and clinicians who rely on timely, locally relevant susceptibility data for treatment decisions.
• Reprioritized funding, new reporting and interoperability standards, and stronger laboratory–data linkages to support rapid, evidence-informed responses.