HIV and ID Observations

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 puzzle […]

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October 29th, 2011

Will An Antiretroviral Patch Help Adherence? Doubtful …

This little nugget came up recently, found by our Journal Watch Executive Editor: Preliminary research suggests that a patch could deliver an AIDS drug to patients … The researchers successfully used transdermal patches to administer 96 percent of an AIDS drug to simulated skin over a week. “Still, the important limitation of pills, regardless of how few […]

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October 23rd, 2011

TB, Timing of Antiretroviral Therapy, and Being a Lumper Rather Than a Splitter

Three key papers on timing of ART in patients with TB have just been published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Fortunately, Carlos Del Rio has done a bang-up job summarizing them in Journal Watch AIDS Clinical Care. And if you’re wondering how we got our title for Carlos’ piece, here’s an e-mail between our Executive Editor to me […]

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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 was to track […]

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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 per […]

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October 4th, 2011

Spanish HIV Vaccine Story Gets Lots of Attention — Here’s Why

If you’re looking for a good way to pass the time while running errands, traveling, or walking to work, I highly recommend the Freakonomics podcasts, which have taught me all sorts of interesting things. Such as the fact that suicide is more common than murder in the USA, but gets way less attention. And how a […]

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October 3rd, 2011

CASCADE: When to Start, (Yet) Another Take

As we await the enrollment, analysis, and results of the START study — which is randomizing patients with CD4>500 to start HIV therapy  vs waiting until the CD4 falls to 350 — much of the research on “when to start” ART in patients with high CD4’s comes from observational studies. Several have already been published […]

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September 24th, 2011

Warning: Viral Replication is Hazardous to Your Health

When studies evaluate the prognostic importance of measuring HIV viral load, they generally do so by assessing a single measurement rather than values obtained longitudinally.  One obvious limitation of this approach is that baseline VL poorly predicts outcome after ART initiation — a finding in stark contrast to the original description of VL from the […]

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September 22nd, 2011

Common Sense on HIV Testing

There’s an editorial in today’s Boston Globe that concisely (188 words) describes the problems with both the current and proposed HIV testing laws in Massachusetts. I’ve not been shy about the fact that I agree with every word of this piece. And though I strongly recommend reading the whole editorial — it’s very well written — if you […]

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September 4th, 2011

“Novel” Approaches to Initial HIV Therapy: Part II

Two studies were just published on alternative strategies for initial HIV therapy. I’ve already reviewed the first one here. The second paper is a single-arm (n=112) study of darunavir/r (once daily) plus raltegravir, the latest riff on the “NRTI sparing” approach. As I mentioned when I first covered this study, the high rate of virologic failure — […]

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