An ongoing dialogue on HIV/AIDS, infectious diseases,
March 5th, 2013
Exploring the Media Fascination with the Baby Cured of HIV
As undoubtedly you’ve heard by now, there’s another person cured of HIV out there — this time, it’s a baby born to an HIV-infected mother. Here’s the story: The mother didn’t know she was HIV positive until delivery, and the baby was found to be infected by both HIV DNA and RNA right at birth. […]
March 3rd, 2013
It’s Not Safe Sex If You’ve Just Had the Smallpox Vaccine
One of my more memorable teachers used to love warning us about the hazards of sex. No, this wasn’t in my 8th grade health class — this was during my first year of Infectious Diseases fellowship, and the teacher was one of our highly experienced attending physicians, now retired. To him, sex carried limitless infectious risks. He […]
February 28th, 2013
Guest Post: CROI at 20 — A Look Back
The inimitable Carlos del Rio looks back at our premier scientific meeting, the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), which starts this Sunday: CROI, which started as a small national conference held in a hotel in Washington DC, will hold its 20th meeting this year . When CROI first took place, we had just returned from Berlin, and HIV scientists […]
February 17th, 2013
An Adherence Intervention That Works — But There’s a Catch
In a previous post, we reviewed the various flavors of medication non-adherence, and concluded with this tantalizing line: Next up: An Adherence Intervention that Actually Works — But There’s a Catch Well here it is, just published online in JAMA Internal Medicine. Dr. Robert Gross (a long-time HIV adherence researcher from U Penn) and colleagues enrolled 180 patients […]
February 13th, 2013
Medication Adherence: The Final Frontier
Treatment of HIV has become so amazingly effective that when it fails, it’s no overstatement to say that it’s usually because the patient is not taking the medications. There are all kinds of provider-related reasons for this — inadequate patient education, prescribing and dispensing errors, failure to address language or education deficits — but here […]
January 9th, 2013
HIV Exceptionalism is Alive and Well — and That’s Too Bad
Email exchange with a colleague who works at one of our community health clinics: Guy: Hi Paul, your patient 17432862 [that’s a made-up medical record number] came to our walk-in clinic with a rash on her hand. OK that I gave her a week of topical steroids? I know how inhaled steroids interact with some meds […]
January 3rd, 2013
What’s a Fulyzaq? I Thought You’d Never Ask
As Physician’s First Watch noted, we sure know what the folks at the FDA were doing this holiday season — and most emphatically they weren’t visiting Aunt Selma in Boca Raton. Nope, they were stuck in White Oak, Maryland, reviewing various new drug applications, with three of the four related to Infectious Disease. The FDA’s late […]
January 1st, 2013
HIV Incidence: The Latest Numbers
The CDC has recently issued the latest report on HIV incidence (i.e., new infections) in the United States, and as always it’s fascinating to review the numbers. To start, the year-by-year estimated incidence: 2007: 53,200 2008: 47,500 2009: 45,000 2010: 47,500 (38,000 men, 9,500 women) Nope, not much change. Will data from HPTN 052 — published in the […]
December 20th, 2012
Severe Telaprevir Rashes and Waiting (or Not Waiting) to Treat Hepatitis C
Yesterday, the FDA issued a drug safety alert about severe rashes — “some fatal” — in patients treated for HCV with interferon, ribavirin, and telaprevir. The culprit, of course, is the telaprevir. The label already contained warning information about serious skin rashes with the drug, and this alert serves to heighten our awareness of the problem, […]
December 5th, 2012
Top HIV Stories of 2012
Somewhere in our genome, we are programmed to use the end of the year as a time to reflect on the previous 12 months — and to make lists! If you don’t believe me, there’s barely a publication or web site out there that hasn’t already succumbed, and we’re just in early December. And what we can […]
Paul E. Sax, MD
Contributing Editor
NEJM Journal Watch
Infectious Diseases
Biography | Disclosures | Summaries
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