Chief Medical Officer's Annual Report 2025 – Infections (4 December 2025)

Summary

Infections are ubiquitous – over the course of our lifetimes we will all experience multiple episodes of infection. In his annual report for 2025 the Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Chris Whitty, focuses on recent trends in infections and changes to the health system, laying out current challenges and considering what comes next.

Content

The report highlights around seven key themes:

• Preventing infection in older adults can significantly improve overall health and quality of life.
• Controlling specific infections has proven highly successful in preventing certain cancers.
• Infections in pregnancy and the neonatal period still present significant risks.
• Easily underestimated but potentially very harmful diseases are increasing due to gradually declining coverage of routine vaccinations in children and young adults over the last decade.
• The burden and range of infections imported into the UK has increased over the last decade.
• Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) continues to be a major risk.
• The periodic occurrence of significant new epidemics and pandemics as a natural consequence of emerging and evolving infections is predictable, even if the timing of their onset and infection is not.