Explore the recorded discovery and history of Acinetobacter baumannii, with source links and stated limits.
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.
LPSN records Acinetobacter baumannii Bouvet and Grimont 1986, validly published in the International Journal of Systematic Bacteriology in the paper that recognised A. baumannii, A. haemolyticus, A. johnsonii and A. junii as new species and emended the descriptions of A. calcoaceticus and A. lwoffii. The epithet honours Paul and Linda Baumann. Type strain ATCC 19606 / DSM 30007 / NCTC 12156.
Peleg, Seifert and Paterson’s Clinical Microbiology Reviews article brought together the organism’s microbiology, hospital epidemiology and resistance. It describes short, plump Gram-negative rods that are hard to destain, community colonisation figures, and hospital-acquired pneumonia as the most common presentation. A review is a synthesis of earlier work, not a discovery date.
These references do not identify a first person ever infected. The 1986 milestone is a taxonomic separation of species within a genus that had been recognised earlier, so it dates a naming decision rather than a first human case or a geographic origin.
Source check: 2026-09-20. Educational content; independent scientific review remains pending.