Thirteen-Year UAE Study Maps Bloodstream Infections and Rising Resistance

Bloodstream infections remain a major cause of hospital admission and death worldwide, yet detailed national data from the Gulf region have been scarce. A new 13-year nationwide study from the United Arab Emirates now offers the first population-level epidemiological benchmark for bloodstream infections in the country, drawing on more than 50,000 unique bacterial and fungal isolates collected between 2010 and 2022 from hospitals, centers and clinics across all seven Emirates.

The analysis, published in the journal Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control, covered 50,457 unique bloodstream infection isolates. The researchers assessed pathogen distribution, the source of acquisition, antimicrobial resistance, multidrug resistance and clinical outcomes, and used multivariable logistic regression to examine associations between infecting pathogens and severe outcomes such as intensive care admission and death.

The study’s central finding is a dual burden of severe bloodstream infection concentrated at the extremes of age. Adults aged 55 years and older accounted for 39.7 percent of cases, experienced frequent hospital-acquired infection at 52.4 percent, and had the highest mortality of any age group at 31.7 percent. At the other end of the age spectrum, children under one year old showed the highest intensive care admission rate, 43.6 percent compared with 25.3 percent overall, alongside a high proportion of hospital-acquired infection at 56.7 percent.

While overall bloodstream infection incidence remained stable across the 13-year period, one pathogen group moved in the opposite direction. Candidemia, infection of the bloodstream by Candida yeast species, increased significantly over time. Candida species also showed the strongest association with intensive care admission and death of any pathogen group in the regression analysis, making fungal bloodstream infection a growing concern in the UAE despite the otherwise flat incidence trend.

The resistance data reveal substantial challenges for treating Gram-negative infections. Klebsiella pneumoniae showed carbapenem resistance in 17.2 percent of isolates. Resistance to third-generation cephalosporins, a mainstay class for treating Enterobacterales, affected nearly half of Escherichia coli isolates at 47.3 percent and 41.2 percent of Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates.

Multidrug-resistant infections carried measurable consequences for patients and health systems. The study found that multidrug-resistant infection was associated with significantly longer hospital stays, and that such infections were concentrated in hospital-acquired cases and in critical care settings.

The authors frame their work as filling a critical data gap in the Gulf region, where comprehensive, multi-year, nationwide surveillance of bloodstream infections has been limited. By pooling isolates from facilities across all seven Emirates over more than a decade, the study provides a baseline against which future changes in pathogen distribution, resistance and outcomes can be measured, and it was carried out with the UAE AMR Surveillance Consortium.

The findings carry the usual caveats of an observational, retrospective surveillance analysis: they describe associations between pathogens and severe outcomes rather than proving causation, and the reported resistance proportions reflect isolates collected between 2010 and 2022 rather than current figures. The article was published on 15 October 2026 as an open-access research paper, initially shared as a peer-reviewed accepted version subject to further editorial edits before the final version of record.

Even so, the picture that emerges is consistent and sobering. Severe outcomes cluster among neonates and older adults, hospital-acquired and critical care infections bear the heaviest load of multidrug resistance, and fungal bloodstream infection is rising where overall incidence is not.

Subject of Research: Epidemiology, clinical outcomes and antimicrobial resistance of bloodstream infections in the United Arab Emirates over 13 years

Article Title: Epidemiology, clinical outcomes, and antimicrobial resistance of bloodstream infections: a 13-year nationwide multicenter study from the United Arab Emirates

Article References: Senghore, M., Thomsen, J., Abdulrazzaq, N. M., Chen, W., Kaambo, E., Weber, S., Jabeen, F., The UAE AMR Surveillance Consortium, Senok, A., Clark, A., Alatoom, A., Hammadi, A. A. A., Ahmed, A. E., Yousef, A. F., Shibl, A., Enshasy, A. M., AlBlooshi, A., Nabi, A., Poddar, A. S., … Everett, D. B. (2026). Epidemiology, clinical outcomes, and antimicrobial resistance of bloodstream infections: a 13-year nationwide multicenter study from the United Arab Emirates. Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13756-026-01830-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13756-026-01830-8

Keywords: bloodstream infections, antimicrobial resistance, United Arab Emirates, candidemia, carbapenem resistance, multidrug resistance, hospital-acquired infection, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, surveillance study, sepsis, infection control