HIV and ID Observations

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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February 27th, 2014

CROI 2015 Dates Announced — And Warning, It’s Still Winter in Boston

From the CROI website: We are pleased to announce that CROI 2015 has been scheduled! Location: Seattle, WA, USA Dates: Monday, February 23 to Thursday, February 26, 2015 Details and schedules: Will be posted in early summer 2014 Love their exclamation point. Yahoo indeed! Kudos to the conference organizers for getting the dates out early this year. Meanwhile, […]

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February 13th, 2014

Jeter is Retiring, and Certain ID Doctors Are Getting Old(er)

It’s safe to say that most of the perspectives on Derek Jeter’s retiring from baseball will not be written by ID doctors, so let me seize the opportunity. And since it’s always risky to dwell on players from a certain team while living in Boston — I have friends for whom a central component of their […]

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December 24th, 2013

Brush with Greatness: John G. Bartlett

At the IDSA meeting in 2012, John Bartlett gave a lecture called, “Infectious Diseases Update for the HIV Provider” — what a great title — which was, as usual, information-packed, practical, well-referenced, and just plain fun. It also occurred to me at the time that there is probably no other person on the planet who […]

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November 27th, 2013

Gynecologists May Treat Men After All

Good news here for gynecologists who screen men for anal cancer: A professional group that certifies obstetrician-gynecologists reversed an earlier directive and said on Tuesday that its members were permitted to treat male patients for sexually transmitted infections and to screen men for anal cancer… It’s always impressive when a group swiftly reverses what is widely perceived […]

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November 23rd, 2013

OB/GYN Board Says Their Docs May Only Treat Women

Here’s a surprising move:  The American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology has decreed that gynecologists may only treat women. From the New York Times coverage: In September, the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology insisted that its members treat only women, with few exceptions, and identified the procedure [high-resolution anoscopy] in which Dr. Stier has expertise as […]

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November 13th, 2013

How Doctors, Nurses, and Other Medical Providers Spend Their Free Time

More absurd paperwork follies, this time from our friends at a mail-order pharmacy: Here, confronted with the challenge of refilling a patient’s HIV medications — which for the record he has been receiving unchanged for over 3 years — the pharmacy decides for the first time to reject the request and send the prescription back to […]

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November 6th, 2013

SINGLE Study Underscores Waning of the Efavirenz Era — But Probably Just in the USA

In today’s New England Journal of Medicine, the SINGLE study finally makes its appearance “in print.”  (The study results were first presented over a year ago.) The highlights: SINGLE was a double-blind, randomized clinical trial comparing abacavir/lamivudine plus dolutegravir to tenofovir/FTC/efavirenz in 833 treatment-naive study subjects. That’s right, three different drugs in each arm — you […]

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October 30th, 2013

HIV Treatment of Serodiscordant Couples: The Home Run, Slam Dunk, and Open Goal in Clinical Research

Just in time for Game 6 of the World Series, my colleague Rochelle Walensky has published a paper in theNew England Journal of Medicine (covered here in NEJM Journal Watch). evaluating the cost-effectiveness of treating HIV-infected individuals in serodiscordant couples. The results: In South Africa, early ART was cost-saving over a 5-year period. In both South Africa and India, early […]

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