Health policy · 19 min read
The six global health security agendas that will decide the next decade — and what they demand of a country like Nepal
Global health security in 2026 is not short of agendas; it is short of implementation. This article takes the six agendas that dominate the international agenda, states precisely where each one stands against primary WHO, UN, World Bank, OECD, IHME and Lancet sources, and then asks the question that matters in Kathmandu rather than Geneva: what does each one actually require of a district health office, a provincial ministry and a national surveillance unit?
- The WHO Pandemic Agreement was adopted at WHA78 on 20 May 2025, but its Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing annex is still unfinished — negotiations were extended again in 2026, so the treaty's core obligations are not yet operative.
- The amended International Health Regulations entered into force on 19 September 2025, which makes legal capacity, not political intent, the binding constraint for countries whose Joint External Evaluation scores remain low.
- Dengue reached 14,434,584 reported cases and 11,201 deaths in 2024 — WHO calls transmission unprecedented, and the expansion is climatic and ecological, not accidental.
- WHO's 2025 surveillance report found one in six laboratory-confirmed common bacterial infections in 2023 were resistant to antibiotic treatment, with resistance rising in over 40% of monitored pathogen-antibiotic combinations since 2018.