HIV and ID Observations

June 16th, 2019

On Father’s Day, a Tribute to a Father Who Isn’t Allowed to Celebrate Father’s Day

Part 1. My Father and How I Became a Doctor I became a doctor with encouragement from my father. Wait, let me rephrase that to capture what happened more accurately. I became a doctor with a fair amount of pressure from my father. Fresh off an adventure abroad, in my early 20s, I had all kinds of pretentious ambitions […]

---

June 9th, 2019

Is It Safe to Alter the CCR5 Receptor? And How Will This Influence HIV Cure Studies?

The HIV cure effort suffered a potential setback this week, as researchers reported an association between having two copies of the CCR5-∆32 mutation and shorter survival. (Quick reminder — the CCR5 receptor is required for most HIV strains to enter target cells. People homozygous for the CCR5-∆32 mutation are almost completely protected from contracting HIV.) By evaluating […]

---

June 2nd, 2019

A Highly Subjective Guide to Clinically Important Infections That Have Changed Names

Why do many clinically important microorganisms change names? They haven’t married and taken their spouse’s name or gone to Hollywood and adopted a stage name. Instead, through the tireless work of microbiologists, taxonomists, and geneticists, they have undergone sufficient reclassification so that their old name just doesn’t make sense anymore. Or more graphically: Why do clinical microbiologists love taxonomy? […]

---

May 27th, 2019

A Day in the Life of a Malaria Diagnosis “Lab” — with Apologies to Twitter’s “Thoughts of Dog”

Scene: A quiet morning, somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. A few roosters crow in the distance. A black Labrador Retriever slowly rouses herself from sleep. ah. nice long nighttime snoozle. my favorite thing. ending soon. but many favorite things. partial list. i’m good with lists. 1. belly rub. c. peanut butter. 4: stuffed toy lamb, with squeak. though missing […]

---

May 19th, 2019

CDC Does Us a Huge Favor by Advising Against Annual Screening of Healthcare Workers for Latent TB

There are definitely things we do in medicine just because that’s how we’ve always done them. Among these evidence-free actions, we can include yearly screening for latent TB infection (LTBI) in all healthcare workers If we carefully examine the rationale behind this practice — as this thorough review nicely does — one would be hard-pressed to find any […]

---

May 12th, 2019

On Mother’s Day, a Tribute to a Mother Who Doesn’t Celebrate Mother’s Day

My siblings and I are pretty lucky, because our mother may be the smartest person in the world. Let me reassure you that this is not just our biased opinion. Everyone who knows her well thinks the same thing — including my wife, who told me today, on Mother’s Day, that my Mom’s remarkable brainpower should […]

---

May 5th, 2019

Latest Published Study on HIV Treatment as Prevention Is Déjà Vu All Over Again, But Some News Is So Good It Never Gets Old

Even if you’re not an ID or HIV specialist, there’s an excellent chance you’ve heard of the PARTNER2 study, just published in The Lancet. If not, the title could not be more descriptive: Risk of HIV transmission through condomless sex in serodifferent gay couples with the HIV-positive partner taking suppressive antiretroviral therapy And, in case you’ve just […]

---

April 28th, 2019

Even More Fun with Old Medical Images

Loyal readers of this site might note that we periodically stray from incisive, topical coverage of our exciting field of Infectious Diseases, and venture off into subjects that may or may not be ID-related. And good news for fans of this approach, because today it’s time to release our third episode of Fun with Old Medical Images.  […]

---

April 22nd, 2019

Two New Trials of Combination Therapy for MRSA Bacteremia Answer Some Questions — and Raise Several New Ones

Every clinically active ID specialist, hospitalist, and cardiologist realizes that treatment of bacteremia due to methicillin-resistant Staph aureus (MRSA) is no easy task. In fact, it’s a problem so difficult that persistent bacteremia due to MRSA deserved highlighting here as an “Unanswerable Problem in Infectious Diseases”. I wrote that over 5 years ago, and you know what? […]

---

April 14th, 2019

Here’s One “Rule” of Medical Education That Needs Fixing — Or at Least a Little Context

Like any card-carrying ID doctor, I enjoy teaching about antibiotics. Give me a whiteboard (small group), or a PowerPoint set-up (lecture hall), and I’m off and running. Not surprisingly, an important theme of these talks revolves around avoiding antibiotic overuse. Over the years, I’ve collected a few egregious examples of how marketing distorts public perception of […]

---