HIV and ID Observations

January 4th, 2012

How Does Herpes Treatment Trigger a Positive Test for Performance-Enhancing Drugs?

Here’s my guess on how many of this blog’s readers know the following “facts”: Acyclovir and related drugs are used to treat herpes: nearly 100% Ryan Braun, superstar left fielder for the Milwaukee Brewers, is facing a 50 game suspension for testing positive for elevated levels of a “banned substance”, most likely testosterone: 10% Braun […]

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December 14th, 2011

No HIV in Pepsi? Now THAT’S a Relief

How reassuring to be treated with the following news: An SMS has been circulating that Pepsi products are contaminated with HIV but Permanis Sandilands Sdn Bhd has clarified that this is a hoax. Its marketing vice-president Hemalatha Ragavan said there was no truth to it. She urged people not to believe such claims. I have a couple […]

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December 8th, 2011

Big TB Prevention Study Important, Highly Relevant — Even Here

As I’ve noted before, tuberculosis is disappearing from the United States — which means that the bulk of cutting-edge research in TB (both clinical and basic science) has little relevance to US-based practitioners. But over in NEJM, a much-anticipated TB study is published today that is highly relevant: We conducted an open-label, randomized noninferiority trial […]

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November 25th, 2011

Childhood Meningitis Terrifying, Fortunately Very Rare

Back in fellowship, we used to discuss the various reasons why we’d be called back into the hospital at night when we were on call. Mind you, this was a fairly rare event, since unlike gastroenterology fellows doing emergency endoscopy for bleeding and cardiology fellows coming in to do the urgent cath, what were we […]

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November 20th, 2011

Who Should Care For The Aging HIV Patient? Everything Old is … Oh You Know

Over in Journal Watch AIDS Clinical Care, Carlos Del Rio reviews a couple of remarkable studies on HIV and aging. From one of them: Compared with the controls, the HIV-infected patients had a higher prevalence of renal failure, bone fracture, and diabetes in every age range evaluated, as well as a higher prevalence of cardiovascular disease […]

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November 14th, 2011

Here Are Two Things You Don’t Hear Together Very Often: Walmart and HIV

As the parent of teenagers (and having been one myself many years ago), I’m acutely aware that everyone wants to think that he or she is special in some way. And while that is literally true (that is, no two people are exactly alike), as anyone will tell you who looks up a Sunday Times crossword […]

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November 5th, 2011

A Mysteriosis about Listeriosis

For obvious reasons, listeriosis has been much in the news recently.  The latest information from CDC on the Colorado cantaloupe outbreak cites 139 cases and 29 deaths. The recent outbreak aside, however, actual cases of listeriosis are pretty rare. We easily could go months in our hospital without seeing a single case, and we have the largest […]

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October 26th, 2011

Xigris is Gone — Not That Many ID Docs Will Notice

From the FDA comes this news: FDA notified healthcare professionals and the public that on October 25, 2011, Eli Lilly and Company announced a worldwide voluntary market withdrawal of Xigris [drotrecogin alfa (activated)]. In a recently completed clinical trial (PROWESS-SHOCK trial), Xigris failed to show a survival benefit for patients with severe sepsis and septic […]

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October 19th, 2011

Going, Going, Gone … HIV Treatment Failure Is Disappearing in People Who Take Their Meds

World Series time, hence the baseball reference in the title. (Doesn’t take much.) But over in Lancet Infectious Diseases — which has turned out to be a terrific journal, by the way — there’s a study reminding us that advances in HIV treatment in the late 2000s were truly spectacular. The goal of the paper […]

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October 4th, 2011

Hormonal Contraception MAY Increase Risk of HIV

From the pages of Lancet Infectious Diseases, a study from Africa: We aimed to assess the association between hormonal contraceptive use and risk of HIV-1 acquisition by women and HIV-1 transmission from HIV-1-infected women to their male partners … Among 1314 couples in which the HIV-1-seronegative partner was female, rates of HIV-1 acquisition were 6·61 […]

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