HIV and ID Observations

June 28th, 2014

CDC Nixes HIV Western Blot in Latest Testing Guidelines

Finally, it’s official — the Western blot is no longer recommended as a confirmatory test for HIV infection. From the latest Laboratory Testing for the Diagnosis of HIV Infection, updated June 27: The HIV-1 Western blot and HIV-1 immunofluorescence assay, previously recommended to make a laboratory diagnosis of HIV-1 infection, are no longer part of the recommended algorithm. […]

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June 15th, 2014

Poll: Should ID Doctors Still Do HIV Primary Care?

My friend and colleague Ken Freedberg is giving a talk soon at our regional IDSA meeting called, “Who Should Be Providing HIV Care?” He’s a very smart guy (except during the football playoffs, when he is possessed by evil forces), so maybe he’ll answer this question that has strangely bedeviled our field for decades. But I’m sure […]

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May 28th, 2014

Some ID Stuff We’re Talking About on Rounds

Just finished two weeks on the inpatient general medical service — hence the radio silence — giving me a chance to work with residents, interns, and medical students. Here’s a smattering of the ID topics we discussed, along with a comment or two: “Common” causes of gram negative soft tissue infection (at least for board exam purposes), and […]

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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 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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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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