Current status, international collaboration, and future directions of a comprehensive antimicrobial resistance surveillance system

The Japanese Nosocomial Infections Surveillance (JANIS) is one of the largest national antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance systems in the world. In particular, the JANIS Clinical Laboratory (CL) division collects comprehensive specimen-based data from diagnostic microbiology laboratories of participating hospitals to monitor the isolation rate of 11 major bacteria and specific AMR bacteria, and creating antibiograms of approximately 20 bacterial species. Data in the JANIS web-database system are also annually tabulated and provided to the WHO Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (GLASS). To create a network of international AMR surveillance systems among Asian countries, Japan is developing an international web-database system named ASIan Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network (ASIARS-Net) based on the JANIS system, but is open-source and available confidentially at almost no cost. JANIS further continues to evolve in multiple directions, some of which are selected and discussed in end of this review.