More than 60,000 Nigerians die every year due to antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the World Health Organisation has warned. WHO Country Representative Dr. Pavel Ursu revealed the alarming figure on Tuesday while commemorating the 2025 World AMR Awareness Week with the theme “Act Now: Protect Our Present, Secure Our Future.”
AMR occurs when microorganisms mutate and stop responding to medicines, making once-treatable infections deadly. WHO described it as one of the world’s fastest-growing health threats, hitting poorer countries and vulnerable groups the hardest.
Ursu said AMR is already increasing health-care costs, weakening food systems, damaging the environment, and threatening global development. He described it as a “silent threat” undermining modern medicine and causing deadly outbreaks, especially among children and mothers.
Globally, AMR was linked to 4.71 million deaths in 2021. Nearly 250,000 of those were in sub-Saharan Africa. In Nigeria, an estimated 50,500 deaths in 2021 were directly caused by AMR, while another 227,000 were associated with drug-resistant bacterial infections—most of them among children under five.
He warned that AMR could kill up to 39 million people by 2050 and cost the world close to $1 trillion annually if urgent action is not taken.
Ursu urged Nigeria and global partners to strengthen surveillance, improve access to quality medicines and diagnostics, invest in research and innovation, and build resilient health systems. He also called for cross-sector collaboration involving human health, animal health, agriculture, and the environment.
“Every action counts,” he stressed—whether from hospital administrators implementing stewardship programmes or farmers adopting safer waste management practices.
