HIV and ID Observations

April 28th, 2011

Hepatitis C Week is Upon Us

After many — and I mean many — years of telling patients that new hepatitis C drugs were “coming soon,” that time has finally come. An FDA Advisory Panel yesterday favorably reviewed the HCV protease inhibitor boceprevir; today telaprevir got the same unanimous report. The FDA will  certainly follow with approval for both drugs, and hence […]

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April 25th, 2011

FEM-PrEP: A Set Back in HIV Prevention Research

HIV prevention has been on such a roll recently that the recent negative news from the FEM-PrEP study came as something of a surprise.  Bottom line: Following a scheduled interim review of the FEM-PrEP study data, the Independent Data Monitoring Committee (IDMC) advised that the FEM-PrEP study will be highly unlikely to be able to demonstrate […]

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April 18th, 2011

When to Start Antiretroviral Therapy, Take 3

A third observational study on “When to Start ART” has just appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine,  “The HIV-CAUSAL Collaboration.” As with ART-CC and NA-ACCORD, it’s a large study, starting with over 20,000 people with HIV with baseline CD4s >500 receiving care in Europe and the United States.  Out of this group, 8392 experienced CD4 […]

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April 15th, 2011

A “New” Antiretroviral Option Quietly Enters the Market

There’s a new antiretroviral option out there, a 400-mg extended-release tablet formulation of nevirapine that can be dosed once daily. However, you might not have noticed, since it’s not really that new, and it’s not clear that this formulation offers any significant advantages over the nevirapine we already have.  Writes Keith Henry over in Journal Watch: Issues […]

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April 11th, 2011

Organ Transplants from HIV-Infected Donors

On the heels of last month’s report of HIV transmission from an organ donor — covered here in Journal Watch — comes this remarkable article in the New York Times about lifting the ban on organ donation from donors known to be HIV positive. Naturally, the first group of patients slated to receive these HIV positive […]

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April 9th, 2011

And Now, for a More Comprehensive CROI Report …

Although I’ve already provided a Really Rapid Review™ of the 18th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), the editors of Journal Watch/AIDS Clinical Care have put together a more comprehensive summary here. I sometimes wonder what research from these conferences will not only stand the test of time, but will grow in importance and […]

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April 5th, 2011

Scamming Academic Journals

Academic scams are not just limited to meetings. Every so often, I receive an e-mail that goes something like this: Dear Dr. Sax, The journal Contemporary Organic Biosynthesis [journal name made up] covers all the latest and outstanding developments in organic biosynthesis studies. It is one of the leading journals for expert reviews in the field. Please visit […]

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April 1st, 2011

Clindamycin or Cephalexin for (Mostly) MRSA?

Over on the Journal Watch Pediatrics site, there’s a summary of a study that compared clindamycin with cephalexin for purulent skin infections in kids age 6 months to 18 years.  The results? MRSA and methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA) were isolated from 70% and 19% of children, respectively … The primary outcome — clinical improvement at 48 […]

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