HIV and ID Observations

January 11th, 2021

After Ivermectin Controversy, A COVID-19-Free ID Link-o-Rama

Wow, quite the week for this country of ours. We’re all deeply saddened by the events, very hopeful that the transition in leadership will be peaceful. And also an eventful week for this little blog. When I wrote “Enter ivermectin — and let the controversy begin,” little did I know. Amazingly, this is already the second-most widely […]

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November 24th, 2020

Some ID Things to Be Grateful for This Holiday Season — 2020 (!) Edition

“Grateful?” some might wonder. “He must be out of his mind.” But even in the cursed year that began shortly after the first report of the disease now known as COVID-19 on (almost) New Year’s Eve, we can still find some things to praise, and to offer our gratitude. Or at the very least, acknowledge that […]

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July 15th, 2020

Really Rapid Review — AIDS 2020 Virtual

The International AIDS Conference — or AIDS 2020 — shifted from its Bay Area dual locations of San Francisco and Oakland to be entirely online. Digital. In the cloud. Virtual. The primary motivation for the switch was to show off what the numerous tech giants in the region could do with this fancy thing called the World […]

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May 25th, 2020

A Major Advance in Non-COVID-19 ID Research You Might Have Missed

One thing about the COVID-19 pandemic — other important non-COVID ID news gets crowded out. As a prime example, take HPTN 083, a major clinical trial in HIV prevention. The results are a big deal, and should have garnered more attention when they were released last week. This randomized, double-blind pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) study compared long-acting injectable […]

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March 16th, 2020

Difficult Times — Meaning No CROI Really Rapid Review 2020

In a usual year, right about now, I’d be obsessed with two things: What were the most practice-changing studies presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, or CROI? I’d want to summarize those for a patented, copyright-protected, check-with-my-lawyer-before-copying, Really Rapid Review©®. How will the upcoming baseball season play out? Most readers here don’t care, […]

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March 6th, 2020

CROI 2020 Will Be a “Virtual Meeting” After All — Plus, What Scares Me (and Doesn’t) About Coronavirus

This just in: BREAKING NEWS: #CROI2020 will be a virtual meeting this year! Thanks to @IAS_USA @DonnaJacobsen and all CROI leadership for wrestling with this difficult decision and putting public health first. https://t.co/KPmJ66x7GL — Melanie Thompson (@drmt) March 6, 2020 If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you might have read here just minutes ago that […]

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February 25th, 2020

First Week on Service, with One-a-Day ID Learning Units

There is almost always something to be learned from every new patient. It might be buried somewhere in the history, or the physical, or the lab tests, or the micro, or the imaging — but the odds are excellent that, with enough rumination, you’ll find it. I can’t remember now who taught me this important fact, or […]

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February 17th, 2020

Short-Course Treatment of Latent TB, Combination Therapy for Staph Bacteremia, Adult Vaccine Guidelines, Novel Antifungals, and Others — A Non-COVID-19 ID Link-o-Rama

There’s so much out there right now on COVID-19 (the disease) and SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) that the other ID news gets crowded out. Which means it’s time for non-COVID-19 ID/HIV Link-o-Rama! I haven’t done one of these in a while, so there’s plenty of material in the vaults yearning to be free. The CDC now recommends short-course, […]

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January 6th, 2020

The Decade’s Top 10 Biggest Changes to ID Clinical Practice

Here’s a question for you ID and HIV and other clinicians out there as you start 2020 — what are the 10 biggest changes to ID/HIV clinical practice over the past 10 years? Not necessarily what are the biggest stories or biggest advances (though they certainly are eligible) — but more specifically, when you are seeing […]

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December 23rd, 2019

FDA Defers Approval of First Long-Acting HIV Therapy, Surprising Everyone

We HIV/ID specialists are lucky. For over two decades, steady progress in HIV treatment brings regular excitement to our field. Some of these advances are incremental, but others represent major leaps forward. One such example of the latter is long-acting injectable therapy with cabotegravir (CAB) and rilpivirine (RPV) for maintaining viral suppression. This strategy — two […]

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