Drug resistant germs cause an estimated 9.7 million infections and 50,800 deaths a year in the United States, the CDC says

The CDC new count of drug resistant infection in America is nearly four times its old count, and the agency is careful to say the germs alone do not explain the jump.

The 2026 Antimicrobial Resistance Threats Report, released on Tuesday, estimates that 19 drug resistant bacterial and fungal pathogens cause about 9.7 million infections and 50,800 deaths a year in the United States. The report works from 2023 data. The 2019 report put the figures at 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths. Dawn Sievert, senior science adviser for the CDC antimicrobial resistance unit, told Healio the agency has updated its data sources, its methods and its analytics, and that readers should not compare the new numbers directly against 2019. What the report claims is the scale of the problem now, measured better than before. Infections tied to health care accounted for more than 42,000 of the deaths.

Four pathogens sit in the urgent tier, the class that the CDC says needs urgent and aggressive action: Candida auris, carbapenem resistant Acinetobacter, carbapenem resistant Enterobacterales, and drug resistant gonorrhea. Thirteen more are rated serious and two concerning, with a watch list of six others. Candida auris, a fungus that spreads on surfaces and equipment in hospitals and nursing homes and can cause fatal bloodstream infections in people already seriously ill, recorded 4,523 American cases in 2023, up more than 50 percent in a year and roughly tenfold since 2019. Some strains resist nearly every antifungal medicine available. A separate CDC study found infections from NDM producing resistant bacteria rose more than 460 percent between 2019 and 2023.

One germ moved the other way. Clostridioides difficile, which causes severe diarrhea and kills people whose gut bacteria have been wiped out by antibiotics, dropped from urgent to serious after infection rates fell from 2018 and held steady from 2020, a change the agency credits in part to infection prevention work in hospitals. Drug resistant Neisseria meningitidis joined the serious list for the first time.

Antimicrobial resistance threatens modern medicine and puts millions of Americans at risk every year, CDC Director Erica Schwartz said in the statement releasing the report. This data shows both the progress we have made and the significant work that remains. Medical groups reading the report pointed at the same gaps the agency named: infection control in hospitals, wider genomic surveillance to track resistance genes as they spread, and money for new antibiotics and antifungals, since resistant germs make the existing drugs less valuable the more they are used and drug companies have little commercial reason to replace them.