IPM Take
AMR policy often talks about new antibiotics and stewardship, but the quieter infrastructure is laboratory quality. If a lab falsely reports susceptibility, the patient may receive a drug that will fail. If a lab falsely reports resistance, clinicians may avoid useful treatment and escalate unnecessarily. ECDC’s report is technical, but its message is political: Europe cannot manage AMR without trustworthy, comparable antimicrobial susceptibility testing.
Executive Summary
On 10 June 2026, ECDC reported that the European Union Reference Laboratory for Public Health on AMR had published the 2025 EARS-Net external quality assessment summary report. The exercise evaluated species identification and antimicrobial susceptibility testing among clinical laboratories participating in the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network. Results were submitted by 895 laboratories, 91.6% of those invited, across 29 EU/EEA countries. Species identification was correct in 99.7% of evaluated results, while antimicrobial susceptibility test interpretations were correct in 94.4% of 56,924 interpretations.
Why it matters
- Diagnostics / pathology: Need continuous quality assurance so AST results remain clinically reliable and comparable across countries.
- Clinicians: Depend on accurate susceptibility reporting to choose effective treatment and avoid unnecessary escalation.
- Policymakers: Should treat laboratory quality systems as AMR infrastructure, not as technical background work.
Before a patient receives the right antibiotic, someone has to identify the organism and interpret its susceptibility profile correctly. That step is often invisible in AMR politics, but it is where treatment decisions and surveillance data begin.
ECDC’s report shows that European laboratories performed strongly overall. The 2025 EQA exercise included six bacterial strains and evaluated species identification and qualitative AST results. All 29 eligible EU/EEA countries participated. Species identification accuracy was extremely high, but AST interpretation still showed major errors and very major errors. Those are not just statistical categories. They can change what clinicians believe about whether an antibiotic will work.
The human perspective is the patient with sepsis, pneumonia, urinary infection or bloodstream infection whose treatment depends on a timely, correct lab result. AMR surveillance is also a patient-safety system: it informs guidelines, hospital stewardship and national policy.
For IPM, this is precision infectious disease in routine form. The right drug for the right patient begins with the right test result. Europe’s AMR strategy must therefore fund not only policy plans and drug pipelines, but also laboratory networks, training, quality assurance and data comparability.nly about drugs. It is about whether health systems can build the genomic operating system that makes those drugs usable.
