By Stella Odueme
Scientists from Nigeria, Ghana, India, the Philippines, Colombia and the United Kingdom have warned that an important resource that should underpin action against Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR) is being underutilized especially in Africa.
This came to fore at the ongoing 2025 World Antimicrobial Resistance Awareness week -18 to 24 November 2025), which has as its theme: ‘Act Now: Protect Our Present, Secure Our Future.’
Scientists are of the consensus that the germs that cause infections are increasingly difficult to treat because many of them have become resistant to previously effective medicines.
Release in a science media outlet, Science for Africa Foundation, said during the COVID-19 pandemic, many African nations built public health genomic science capacity from scratch to variant-type the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the pandemic, and the information was used to inform the nature and deployment of COVID diagnostics and vaccines.
The same technology, it said can be applied to confront the accelerating antimicrobial resistance crisis.
“But despite most of the estimated five-million deaths from AMR occurring in Africa and Asia, nearly 90% of high-quality bacterial genomes still come from high-income countries, leaving vast blind spots in the regions most affected.
“This is not just a data gap, but a dangerous blind spot because genomic data is accelerating the development tools against antimicrobial resistance.
“The new, and freely available real-time tracking platform amr.watch, launched this year by Oxford University’s Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance (CGPS), had incorporated more than 620,000 microbial genomes, by March 2025, making it possible for scientists and policymakers to visualise how resistant bacterial lineages, and the genes they carry, spread across borders and over time.
“But even though most African countries have at least one laboratory capable of generating information-rich genomic sequence, amr.watch shows a critical mass of genomes in very few African countries, and many present no data at all.”
According to release, the authors of an opinion piece just published on 21 November 2025, in the Lancet Infectious Diseases state that: “COVID-19 proved what genomic surveillance can do, track threats in real time, guide policy, and save lives, But instead of redirecting this capability toward AMR, one of the biggest health threats of our time, we are letting it slip away.”
Prof. Iruka Okeke, from the University of Ibadan (UI), Nigeria, who was co-author on the report says that not enough resources are available to hospital laboratories that recover bacteria from patients, which need to be fed into genome sequencing.
“This is compromising patient care and AMR because without testing, the right treatments cannot be selected.”
Also, Dr. Beverly Egyir, a sequencing scientist in Ghana, who also contributed to the piece, states that too few of the few isolates that are cultured from African patients reach sequencing facilities and are sequenced.
Okeke agrees, “We do not have a clear picture of which germs circulate on the African continent, where they come from and how they are changing.
“Every genome shared publicly is a piece of the global AMR picture,” said Prof David Aanensen, Director of CGPS and Professor of Genomic Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, who co-developed amr.watch with some of the opinion piece co-authors.
To close important gaps in our understanding, the authors of the opinion piece call for urgent action in four areas: I Sustainable local investment: Sequencing infrastructure that is no longer being used to track COVID-19 and other infectious diseases needs to be pivoted to address the threat of AMR, Global standardization, encouraging the use of harmonized methods, which is easier to do using genomic than other approaches, Trust-based data sharing so that laboratories that do produce data ensure that everyone can use it and they get credit for their work and addressing inequities that make it especially difficult and costly to generate and share genomic data in Africa.
With its own Pathogen Genomics Initiative, which is developing roadmaps for genomic surveillance, and high infectious disease burden, Africa has much of what it needs to be at the fore-front of using genomics to stem the threat of AMR and “securing our future.”
