BRICS countries have committed to deeper cooperation on infectious disease surveillance and medical product regulation, alongside a renewed push for local production of medicines, vaccines, and diagnostics across member nations. The commitments were outlined in the New Delhi Declaration, adopted at the BRICS Summit 2026 held in Delhi on September 12 and 13, marking one of the bloc’s most detailed joint health agendas to date.
A New Early Warning System for Infectious Disease
Central to the declaration is the establishment of a dedicated sub-working group to advance the BRICS Integrated Early Warning System, aimed at strengthening surveillance, early detection, and rapid-response capabilities amid growing concerns around infectious disease outbreaks, zoonotic threats, and antimicrobial resistance. The system is intended to facilitate faster exchange of best practices in outbreak response and promote coordinated action on epidemic-prone diseases, with the declaration explicitly noting that public health emergencies increasingly transcend national borders.
That framing echoes lessons drawn from recent global health crises, where slow or fragmented information-sharing between countries has repeatedly hampered early response efforts, from COVID-19 to more localized outbreaks. A coordinated, five-nation surveillance network, if it delivers on its stated goals, would give member states a faster line of sight into cross-border health threats than any of them could build independently.
Deepening Medical Product Regulatory Cooperation
Alongside surveillance, BRICS nations agreed to extend an existing memorandum of understanding on regulatory cooperation to medical product authorities across all member countries. The stated goal is developing collaborative regulatory approaches that ensure the continued availability and accessibility of quality, safe, and effective medical products, an ambition similar in spirit to the streamlined approval pathways India’s own parliamentary committee recently recommended domestically for medical devices.
Notably, the declaration stops short of proposing anything resembling a unified BRICS pharmaceutical regulator. Cooperation is framed around shared best practices and coordination between national regulators, with each country’s existing laws and approval systems remaining fully intact, meaning the practical effect on medicine approvals and market access will ultimately depend on how individual national regulators choose to implement these commitments.
Local Production and Supply Chain Resilience
The declaration links health security directly to manufacturing capacity, calling for stronger health infrastructure and local production of medicines, vaccines, and diagnostics, backed by resilient supply chains, laboratory networks, and expanded use of digital health tools. The goal, as framed in the declaration, isn’t complete self-sufficiency for any single member, but a collective capacity strong enough to withstand future health emergencies without depending entirely on production concentrated outside the bloc.
India-Russia pharmaceutical manufacturing projects offer one concrete example of this broader trend already underway, with Russian officials pointing to joint production initiatives as a model for the kind of bilateral manufacturing cooperation the wider declaration encourages across all five member states.
Digital Health and AI Take Center Stage
The declaration also endorsed greater cooperation on digital health, specifically calling out the use of artificial intelligence to improve healthcare access, preparedness, and emergency response in remote areas. That emphasis lines up with a broader global trend: according to a market report from Acumen Research and Consulting, the global AI in healthcare market was valued at USD 41.84 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach roughly USD 1,136.90 billion by 2035, growing at a 39.1 percent compound annual growth rate, with Asia Pacific, home to three of the five BRICS members, expected to be the fastest-growing region over that period. The declaration’s language on AI for remote healthcare access reflects exactly the kind of clinical and diagnostic AI applications already driving that market’s growth trajectory.
Tuberculosis, Mental Health, and Traditional Medicine in Focus
Tuberculosis received specific attention as what the declaration called a critical global public health challenge, with member states committing to sustained investment in TB research, technology sharing, and cross-learning between countries. Mental health emerged as another significant area of cooperation, with BRICS nations backing a Training Hub Network and a Network of Centres of Excellence; Bengaluru-based NIMHANS has been designated the coordinating centre for that network, giving India a leading role in shaping the bloc’s mental health cooperation going forward.
The declaration also endorsed the BRICS Mission for Healthy Lifestyle, targeting rising rates of obesity and non-communicable diseases, alongside a new BRICS Expert Working Group on Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine, intended to support coordinated research on medicinal plants and herbal preparations across member states’ shared traditional pharmacopoeias.
A Pandemic Agreement Footnote
The declaration reaffirmed the World Health Organization’s coordinating role across all of these initiatives and called for continued engagement on the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing Annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement, the international framework governing how pathogen samples and genetic data are shared globally, while explicitly recognizing member countries’ sovereign rights over their own biological resources. The WHO has publicly praised the New Delhi Declaration’s health provisions.
What This Means in Practice
Taken as a whole, the health commitments in this year’s New Delhi Declaration read less like a single unified health policy and more like a coordination framework, one built around shared systems for surveillance, regulatory dialogue, and manufacturing resilience, while leaving each member state’s own laws, regulatory authority, and health priorities firmly in place. Whether that translates into meaningfully faster outbreak detection or smoother medical product access across five very different health systems will depend less on the declaration’s language and more on how quickly the new sub-working groups, the Integrated Early Warning System chief among them, move from paper commitments into operating institutions. Full details of the declaration were first reported by Business Standard.