An ongoing dialogue on HIV/AIDS, infectious diseases,
February 28th, 2013
Guest Post: CROI at 20 — A Look Back
The inimitable Carlos del Rio looks back at our premier scientific meeting, the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), which starts this Sunday: CROI, which started as a small national conference held in a hotel in Washington DC, will hold its 20th meeting this year . When CROI first took place, we had just returned from Berlin, and HIV scientists […]
February 24th, 2013
Solve This Problem Please — Microbiology Results in Electronic Medical Records
Our hospital and affiliated practices have had electronic medical record (EMRs) of some sort for decades, so I’ve had my chance to try my hand at multiple “platforms,” both commercial and home-brew. (Weirdly — and I kid you not on this — a version of the first iteration from the 1980s is still around, running parallel […]
February 17th, 2013
An Adherence Intervention That Works — But There’s a Catch
In a previous post, we reviewed the various flavors of medication non-adherence, and concluded with this tantalizing line: Next up: An Adherence Intervention that Actually Works — But There’s a Catch Well here it is, just published online in JAMA Internal Medicine. Dr. Robert Gross (a long-time HIV adherence researcher from U Penn) and colleagues enrolled 180 patients […]
February 13th, 2013
Medication Adherence: The Final Frontier
Treatment of HIV has become so amazingly effective that when it fails, it’s no overstatement to say that it’s usually because the patient is not taking the medications. There are all kinds of provider-related reasons for this — inadequate patient education, prescribing and dispensing errors, failure to address language or education deficits — but here […]
February 7th, 2013
Ciguatera Is Hot (But It Could Be Cold)
The news about the cases of ciguatera fish poisoning in New York (NY Times here, MMWR here) reminded me of several unusual things about this form of “harmful algal bloom,” as it is so artfully called by the experts. Specifically, here are six: Symptoms are bizarre. It starts out like a standard case of gastroenteritis — nausea […]