An ongoing dialogue on HIV/AIDS, infectious diseases,
June 4th, 2011
HIV Epidemiology and Something Even Many Smart Medical Students Don’t Know
Periodically I like to give an informal quiz to the medical students about HIV epidemiology. It’s a multiple choice question that goes something like this: Based on the recent epidemiology of HIV in the United States, in what group are new cases of HIV infection rising the fastest? Men who have sex with men (MSM) […]
August 26th, 2010
Lyme Cases Up — Anecdotes, True Epidemiology, and More Anecdotes
All of us New England-based ID doctors (and internists and family practitioners and pediatricians and NPs/PAs in primary care) who have been in practice a while will tell you that Lyme cases have been increasing for years. And it’s not just the number of cases, it’s also where and when they are occurring. A few years […]
December 5th, 2008
New Case Definition for HIV Infection? Yawn …
The CDC has revised its case definition for HIV infection and AIDS, so that now laboratory evidence — a positive antibody test, or detectable HIV RNA or DNA – is required for the diagnosis. It’s not intended to guide clinical practice, but still — what took them so long? A clinical diagnosis of AIDS was only […]
November 30th, 2008
How to End the HIV Epidemic
Answer: Put everyone on treatment. Conspicuously absent for decades, the prevention part of the “when to start antiviral therapy?” question has now moved front and center in two recent papers: In this week’s Lancet, a group from the WHO estimated what would happen if there were annual universal HIV testing, and then immediate treatment for […]
April 17th, 2008
Required Reading: Bat-Related Human Rabies
A group of researchers in Canada have done infectious diseases experts a big favor — they’ve summarized a staggering amount of useful data on bat-related cases of human rabies in a paper just published in Clinical Infectious Diseases. (Note to non-ID specialists: infectious diseases doctors spend a lot of time answering questions about rabies in […]
Paul E. Sax, MD
Contributing Editor
NEJM Journal Watch
Infectious Diseases
Biography | Disclosures | Summaries
Learn more about HIV and ID Observations.
NEJM Journal Watch — Recent Infectious Disease Articles- Observations from ID and Beyond: When Required Learning Modules Surprise You (In a Good Way)
- Do Cerebrospinal Fluid Immune Markers Predict Outcomes in Cryptococcal Meningitis?
- Cefixime: Might It Be an Option for Treating Early Syphilis?
- Should Emergency Departments Offer Routine Vaccines to Adults?
- Should Immunosuppression Be Interrupted During an Infection?