Archive for May, 2009
Paul Sax • May 28th, 2009
Our pal Paul Farmer keeps racking up the titles: Dr. Paul Farmer, a pioneer in improving health services in the Third World, has been named chairman of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine … (snip) Peter Brown, spokesman for Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said Farmer also had been named to succeed [...]
Paul Sax • May 24th, 2009
Don’t look now, Massachusetts, but Connecticut could be next: AN ACT CONCERNING REVISIONS TO THE HIV TESTING CONSENT LAW. This bill revises the law on consent for HIV-related testing. Specifically, the bill: 1. eliminates the requirement for separate, written or oral consent for HIV testing and instead allows general consent for the performance of medical [...]
Paul Sax • May 19th, 2009
With first-line therapy for HIV being so astonishingly successful, much of what we do in practice is tweak regimens that are by virologic and immunologic standards, working just fine: Viral load undetectable, CD4 stable. But not so fast — while one of my colleagues said that if he didn’t change his patients’ regimens, then he’d [...]
Paul Sax • May 13th, 2009
File this under, “physicians behaving badly”: The nearly universal MD practice of going to work while sick. The ironic thing is we think we’re being selfless — after all, if we don’t show up, our patients will need to be rescheduled, or someone will need to cover, or some administrative/teaching task will not get done [...]
Paul Sax • May 7th, 2009
The gang from Canada is at it again, reviewing human rabies cases from bats and trying to make some sense of the data. (For a summary of their outstanding prior paper in CID, read this.) But before we get to their latest masterwork, here are some questions to ponder. While doing so, keep in mind [...]
Paul Sax • May 3rd, 2009
At the end of last week, “swine flu” became “H1N1″. The CDC web site explains why: This virus was originally referred to as “swine flu” because laboratory testing showed that many of the genes in this new virus were very similar to influenza viruses that normally occur in pigs in North America. But further study [...]