WHO: AMR for humans surveillance program page

WHO has been leading the response to AMR over the past two decades and its efforts led to the approval of the Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance (GAP-AMR) by the Sixty-eighth World Health Assembly in May 2015. During the same year, the Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System (GLASS) was launched upon request by the assembly in resolution WHA68.7, with the aim to support the GAP-AMR, and specifically the GAP-AMR second objective, which is to strengthen knowledge through surveillance and research and to enhance existing activities. GLASS has evolved since its launch when the only available technical module was the monitoring of AMR in common bacterial pathogens (GLASS-AMR). Current technical modules include surveillance activities built on routinely available AMR and antimicrobial consumption (AMC) data, with a focus on surveillance and activities aimed at generating information for specific purposes, based on countries’ needs
GLASS-AMR holds a data call between May and August every year and collects information on the implementation of the national AMR surveillance systems for the data call year, including AMR rates for the previous calendar year. AMR data at national level are collected through a system that gathers results from AST for common human bacterial pathogens on four specimens sent routinely to laboratories for clinical purposes. The “population under surveillance” is defined as patients seeking care in health care facilities. Based on the rationale that the growth of a pathogen in selected specimens is a proxy of infection in the associated anatomical sites, AMR data are collected for four infection sites: bloodstream infections caused by Acinetobacter spp., E. coli, K. pneumoniae, Salmonella spp., S. aureus and S. pneumoniae; urinary tract infections caused by E. coli and K. pneumoniae; gastrointestinal infections caused by Salmonella spp. and Shigella spp.; and genital infections caused by N. gonorrhoeae. Together with patients’ microbiological results (bacterial isolation and identification, AST), countries are also invited to report demographic and epidemiological variables in aggregated format, such as age, gender, and origin of infection, with the latter used as a proxy to define where the infection has been contracted (hospital versus community). For all samples taken for microbiological testing, GLASS also collects data on both the number of patients with positive samples for a specific specimen type (including both isolates of the target pathogens and other bacteria, as well as antibiotic susceptibility of positive isolates) and the number of patients with negative samples (no microbial growth).