Antimicrobial Resistance
Drug-resistant infections already kill more than HIV or malaria and are projected to accelerate sharply.
Severity score
76.3
Critical · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Bacteria, fungi and parasites are increasingly resistant to the drugs used to treat them, driven by over-prescription in humans and heavy prophylactic use in agriculture. AMR is a slow-moving structural threat: it makes routine surgery, chemotherapy and childbirth progressively more dangerous. Because deaths are recorded under the underlying infection, AMR mortality is estimated statistically rather than counted directly.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
85Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
80People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
80Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
40Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
88Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.