HIV and ID Observations

May 4th, 2011

How Much Do ID/HIV Doctors Get Paid?

A long time ago, I was very close to becoming a Cardiologist. Really. Even though my fascination with ID and microbiology started in medical school — and believe me, not much fascinated me in medical school — the fact that all the top residents in my program were going into Cardiology made me feel that somehow […]

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April 25th, 2011

FEM-PrEP: A Set Back in HIV Prevention Research

HIV prevention has been on such a roll recently that the recent negative news from the FEM-PrEP study came as something of a surprise.  Bottom line: Following a scheduled interim review of the FEM-PrEP study data, the Independent Data Monitoring Committee (IDMC) advised that the FEM-PrEP study will be highly unlikely to be able to demonstrate […]

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April 18th, 2011

When to Start Antiretroviral Therapy, Take 3

A third observational study on “When to Start ART” has just appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine,  “The HIV-CAUSAL Collaboration.” As with ART-CC and NA-ACCORD, it’s a large study, starting with over 20,000 people with HIV with baseline CD4s >500 receiving care in Europe and the United States.  Out of this group, 8392 experienced CD4 […]

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April 15th, 2011

A “New” Antiretroviral Option Quietly Enters the Market

There’s a new antiretroviral option out there, a 400-mg extended-release tablet formulation of nevirapine that can be dosed once daily. However, you might not have noticed, since it’s not really that new, and it’s not clear that this formulation offers any significant advantages over the nevirapine we already have.  Writes Keith Henry over in Journal Watch: Issues […]

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April 11th, 2011

Organ Transplants from HIV-Infected Donors

On the heels of last month’s report of HIV transmission from an organ donor — covered here in Journal Watch — comes this remarkable article in the New York Times about lifting the ban on organ donation from donors known to be HIV positive. Naturally, the first group of patients slated to receive these HIV positive […]

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April 9th, 2011

And Now, for a More Comprehensive CROI Report …

Although I’ve already provided a Really Rapid Review™ of the 18th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), the editors of Journal Watch/AIDS Clinical Care have put together a more comprehensive summary here. I sometimes wonder what research from these conferences will not only stand the test of time, but will grow in importance and […]

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March 30th, 2011

Journal Club: Even When You Think You Should Wait, It’s Probably Time to Start

Two papers just published in AIDS with relevance to the “when to start” antiretroviral therapy question. Both apply to certain patients in whom we might consider waiting to start treatment– but both these studies suggest we do otherwise. The first applies to the patients with slooooow CD4 decline. Perhaps so slow that both you and your patient […]

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March 18th, 2011

Friday Fosfomycins

Today’s ID/HIV comments and links are named after every ID specialist’s favorite new toy for UTIs. This HIV transmission from a kidney donor is getting quite a bit of media play, as such complications always do.  I was at a meeting this AM when one of my colleagues (an endocrinologist) commented how horrible she thought it […]

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March 8th, 2011

Really Rapid Review of CROI 2011 — and No CROI 2012 Dates

With CROI 2011 now officially over, I offer below the following Really Rapid Review™ for ID/HIV Specialists with limited time — or for those who said they went to the conference but spent the entire week shopping in the Prudential Mall and eating at Legal Seafood: Lots on PrEP.  Bottom line — it works if you take […]

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March 1st, 2011

Like It or Not, PrEP Enters the Clinic

Since the publication of iPrEx, the hypothetical decision about whether to prescribe pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) has become a practical reality. As a result, we’ve posted a case on the Journal Watch/AIDS Clinical Care site, describing someone who requests intermittent pre-exposure prophylaxis to prevent HIV. It’s a high-risk, HIV-negative man who’s been treated several times with post-exposure prophylaxis. The case […]

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