Read condition-specific symptoms and clinical context for Acinetobacter baumannii. A hardy hospital bacterium that often just sits on skin or equipment but can cause hard-to-treat infections in intensive care.
CDC describes Acinetobacter as a group of bacteria commonly found in the environment, in soil and water, and states that infections generally occur in people in healthcare settings. A. baumannii can cause bloodstream, urinary tract, lung and wound infections, and CDC notes that in some cases people can carry the bacteria without being infected, known as colonization. Peleg and colleagues describe short, plump Gram-negative rods that are difficult to destain and may therefore be misidentified as Gram-negative or Gram-positive cocci, growing as smooth, sometimes mucoid, grayish white colonies; the genus name itself derives from the Greek for nonmotile. The same review reports that A. baumannii is found only rarely on the skin of people outside hospital.
The bundled CDC and review sources name the body sites A. baumannii infects — bloodstream, urinary tract, lungs and wounds, with hospital-acquired pneumonia the most common — rather than one symptom list, because what a person experiences depends on which site is infected. No species-wide symptom list is invented here. CDC states separately that people can carry the bacteria without being infected, so colonisation and infection are kept apart in this profile. The Peleg review reports that up to 43% of non-hospitalized individuals were colonised with Acinetobacter organisms while A. baumannii itself was found only rarely on human skin, at 0.5% and 3% in the community populations studied.
Source check: 2026-09-20. Educational content; independent scientific review remains pending.