HIV and ID Observations

November 7th, 2009

A Career in Infectious Diseases and “The Next Big Thing”

I was working with a medical intern in clinic this past week who is potentially interested in ID. After seeing our 3rd consecutive stable HIV patient, he asked me what I thought the next big challenge would be in our field — especially since HIV treatment has been “solved.” “Solved” might be stating it a […]

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October 20th, 2009

Well That Was Fast! HIV Vaccine Trial Published

Remember the HIV vaccine trial press release?  The one announcing the first-ever positive result? Then the backlash, with people questioning how the analyses were done, and reported? Now, less than a month later, we have the scientific presentation and the paper appear on the same day. Read all about it here and here. If you […]

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September 30th, 2009

The Battle for Colonic Microflora

My two favorite newspapers (New York Times and Wall Street Journal — sorry, hometown paper) have just covered opposite ends of a topic on the edges of ID practice — namely, colonic micro-organisms. Too few? Too many? Wrong type? In the Times, a review of the probiotic debate: Probiotics are live micro-organisms that work by […]

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September 25th, 2009

MRSA in Pets

As every card-carrying ID specialist knows, hardly anything is more common these days than patients with — and questions about — methcillin-resistant Staph aureus, or MRSA. And one question I’ve been hearing increasingly these days is “Could I be getting my recurrent infection from Rufus?” To which the answer is, unfortunately, yes. (I had a dog […]

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September 18th, 2009

Integrase Inhibitors: In Search of an Abbreviation

The alphabet soup that characterizes HIV therapeutics has always been one of its quirky challenges — for example, who could possibly know that 3TC, CBV, TZV, EPZ, and LAM all refer to drugs that are (or contain) lamivudine? This drives our ID fellows nuts, and is certainly a strong deterrent to non-HIV specialists to learning […]

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August 26th, 2009

Late Summer Odds and Ends: Circumcision, H1N1 Vaccine, Lyme Movie, etc.

A few ID/HIV items to cover before summer “unofficially” ends (Sept 1?  Kids back at school?  Labor Day?): Will US Public Health officials recommend infant male circumcision to prevent HIV?  They might be considering such a move, but I suspect it will not be strongly promoted.  After all, none of the studies demonstrating its efficacy […]

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August 14th, 2009

Who Gets Toxoplasmosis in the United States?

This might seem bizarre, but one of the reasons I chose to go into Infectious Diseases as a field was the names of the diseases (and often the micro-organisms that caused them) sounded so darn cool. For example, if you were a science fiction writer you could hardly come up with a better-sounding name for […]

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August 5th, 2009

Just Out: Primary Care HIV Guidelines

Over on the CID web site, they have the revised version of the “IDSA Primary Care Guidelines for the Management of Persons Infected with Human Immunodeficiency Virus”. It’s a great document, filled with useful references and a particularly strong table where to find other consensus guidelines (diabetes, hyperlipidemia, mental health, others). My vote for what […]

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July 25th, 2009

IAS Cape Town 2009: Some Greatest Hits

Below is a highly-subjective list of some of the highlights from the Cape Town IAS meeting. I’m sure I missed something — it’s impossible to see everything at these large conferences.  Corrections/additions welcome! My miss-rate might be particularly high since the international AIDS meetings are appropriately focused on HIV treatment in resource-limited settings (especially Africa) […]

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July 20th, 2009

Cape Town IAS Meeting — A Quick Look Back at Durban 2000

The international AIDS meeting finds its way today to South Africa, the country with arguably the greatest needs for HIV prevention and treatment. This is not the first time the meeting was in this country, of course — in 2000, the World AIDS Conference took place in Durban, a truly landmark event in the history […]

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