HIV and ID Observations

May 15th, 2014

CDC Recommends Broader Use of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis — Can We Make It Happen?

Making a much stronger and more comprehensive statement than their earlier “Guidance,” the CDC is now recommending tenofovir/FTC (Truvada) for all Americans at high risk for HIV. More specifically, they recommend it for a broad range of people who have certain risk factors (click to see full size image): One certainly gets why this was done — as summarized nicely in […]

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May 3rd, 2014

The Top Items from the Revised DHHS HIV Treatment Guidelines

A sparkling, shiny new revision of the DHHS HIV Treatment Guidelines was released this week (thanks Alice Pau!), and provides plenty to read and think about — 285 pages, if you’re counting. A few ways to navigate this gargantuan effort more efficiently — the What’s New section, the recommendations summarized here, and the tables here. But if you want the […]

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April 27th, 2014

Why ID/HIV Specialists Rank Last in MD Salaries

Here’s a figure from Medscape listing 2013 physician compensation: Now a median of $174,000/year is hardly chump change, so I don’t expect much in the way of sympathy on these data. On the other hand, someone has to to be last, and note that our income hasn’t increased a bit since the last time I commented […]

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April 12th, 2014

Unwittingly, HCV “News” Brackets Our Current Treatment Era on Successive Days

I’ve already told you what a fan I am of Physician’s First Watch, the daily email summary of hot medical news provided by my colleagues here at the Massachusetts Medical Society. If you haven’t signed up, you must do so — let’s play a short tune (always a favorite) for background music while you head over […]

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April 8th, 2014

Would “HIV Controllers” Benefit from Antiretroviral Therapy?

Let me start with a disclosure — I’m the co-PI (along with Jon Li and Florencia Pereyra) on a study addressing the very question in the title. The reason for this post is that the topic has been the beneficiary of some terrific coverage in Nature Medicine, both of this research question specifically and the whole topic of […]

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April 5th, 2014

$0 for 30 Minutes of My Time? Sign Me Up!

Best e-mail survey ever, my second invitation from them — hence a “friendly reminder”: Dear Sax, This is a friendly reminder about the online study we recently invited you to – X5328963_HCV Approximate interview length: 30 minutes Honorarium: $0 Estimated end date: 2014.06.22 By clicking the survey link below, you agree to participate under the […]

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March 29th, 2014

Opening Day ID Link-o-Rama

Several ID/HIV tidbits to keep you entertained until Sunday night’s opening “day” — for baseball that is. (I hear there’s some sort of basketball tournament going on as well.) Away we go! Female-to-female sexual transmission of HIV is extremely uncommon — though one such case was diagnosed at our hospital over 20 years ago — but this most recent report from Texas […]

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March 12th, 2014

Really Rapid Review — CROI 2014, Boston

Despite the winter that would never end, intrepid HIV/ID researchers and clinicians arrived in Boston for this year’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections –or more accurately, Conference on Retroviruses and Flaviviridae (little ID joke there) — which just finished last week. Not that it was easy — a winter storm roared eastward as the […]

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March 10th, 2014

CROI Is Over — and a Baby Once Again Takes Center Stage

One of our fellows asked me this AM when I was posting a RRR (Really Rapid Review™) of CROI 2014, and my response was to clear my throat, make some vague excuses, and curse the respiratory viruses that seem as perpetual as the cold weather this year. It’s in the works, promise — but in the […]

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February 23rd, 2014

A Lower Dose of Efavirenz Works Just Fine — and Why This Matters

As we heard last year in Malaysia, and now published in The Lancet, 400 mg of efavirenz is just as effective as the standard 600 mg dose. The proportion of participants with a viral load below 200 copies per mL at week 48 was 94·1% for efavirenz 400 mg and 92·2% for 600 mg (difference 1·85%, 95% CI −2·1 […]

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