Govt. Ramps Up AMR Surveillance; Calls For Coordinated Action

Flagging the mounting threat posed by antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the Government has scaled up laboratory networks and expanded environmental surveillance mechanisms to curb drug resistance across the country, Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare Anupriya Patel said on Saturday.

She was speaking at AMR NEXT 2025, a two-day conclave in the national capital where global public health experts, researchers and innovators exchanged perspectives on policy priorities, surveillance strengthening and catalytic interventions across human, animal and environmental health.

“India recognises antimicrobial resistance as a major public health challenge and has operationalised a National Action Plan grounded in One Health principles,” Patel said. She noted that the expansion of lab capacity, standardisation of diagnostic methods and integration of surveillance networks across sectors have enabled quicker detection of resistance patterns and improved data sharing with the World Health Organization.

The challenge, however, remains formidable. India continues to carry one of the world’s heaviest burdens of bacterial infections, with national surveillance data revealing worrying resistance trends in pathogens such as E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus and Acinetobacter baumannii.

While the Indian Council of Medical Research reports a slight improvement in E. coli susceptibility to ceftazidime between 2023 and 2024, experts caution that steadily rising resistance to last-line drugs including carbapenems and colistin may sharply narrow treatment choices in the coming years.

Speakers at the conference underscored several factors fuelling AMR — from high infectious disease load and overuse of antibiotics in human and veterinary care to over-the-counter access, gaps in diagnostic stewardship and pharmaceutical discharge contaminating water sources.

These patterns, they warned, will translate into profound economic implications through longer hospital admissions, increased treatment costs and substantial productivity losses.

“Antimicrobial resistance continues to exert a heavy toll on health systems, elevating mortality and sharply escalating the cost of care,” said Dr. Sanjeev Singh, Medical Director, Amrita Hospital, Faridabad.

Calling for a united global front, Professor Alison Holmes OBE of Imperial College London emphasised the need for a “strengthened, coordinated international effort” to prevent AMR from eroding decades of medical advancement.

According to the latest report under the Antimicrobial Resistance Research & Surveillance Network (AMRSN) of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), gram-negative bacteria remained the predominant pathogens isolated from blood, urine, cerebrospinal fluid and respiratory specimens, with Escherichia coli emerging as the most frequent isolate.

The report covered data collected between January 1 and December 31, 2024. It tracked resistance trends across six major pathogenic groups through laboratories operating under standardised bacteriology and mycology testing protocols.

The latest dataset comprises 99,027 culture-positive isolates reported from tertiary-care hospitals. ICMR has cautioned that the findings, while nationally significant, reflect hospital-based trends and should not be directly extrapolated to community-level AMR burden.

Among healthcare-associated bloodstream infections, Gram-negative organisms accounted for 72.1% of cases, while fungal pathogens contributed 10.2% and Gram-positive bacteria 17.7%.

Ventilator-associated pneumonia was overwhelmingly caused by A. baumannii, K. pneumoniae and P. aeruginosa, together constituting nearly 80% of identified pathogens — a trend that, the report notes, warrants restraint in empirical use of vancomycin, teicoplanin and linezolid, as per the report.

It also flagged steadily increasing resistance to carbapenems in K. pneumoniae and related Enterobacterales — a trend with serious implications for the management of bloodstream and hospital-acquired infections.

The trends, taken together, underline an escalating resistance burden and make a compelling case for tighter stewardship protocols and more judicious prescribing practices.