HIV and ID Observations

August 24th, 2020

FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization for Convalescent Plasma for COVID-19 Seems To Be Fooling No One

Starting late Saturday night, and proceeding the next day — like a relentless series of coming attractions for a blockbuster summer movie or the finale of a reality TV series — we repeatedly heard word that the President planned to make an announcement Sunday evening about a “major therapeutic breakthrough” in treatment of COVID-19. 6 […]

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August 9th, 2020

Rapid Home Testing for Contagious COVID-19: How to Make It Happen

You know that feeling when you have an aha moment. If you’re not familiar with the phrase, we can’t do better than our friends from Merriam-Webster: aha moment (noun):  a moment of sudden realization, inspiration, insight, recognition, or comprehension This is how I felt when research revealed three key findings related to COVID-19 transmission: A […]

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August 4th, 2020

Carbapenems and Pseudomonas, Lyme and Syphilis Testing, a Bonus Point for Doxycycline, and Some Other ID Stuff We’ve Been Talking About on Rounds

As noted multiple times, many of us ID doctors attend on the general medical service. This offers us a chance to broaden our patient care activities and to work with medical students, interns, and residents. Boy, that’s fun! Yes, those of us who attend on medicine enjoy it enormously, though the experience humbles us on […]

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July 19th, 2020

Reaching Out to ID Doctors in COVID-19 Hot Spots — You Must Be Truly Exhausted

For us ID doctors in most of the northeastern United States (and Chicago and Detroit and some other northern cities), March and April hit us like a giant wave of never-ending calls, pages, emails, and crises. With COVID-19 case numbers increasing every day, the challenges crashed down on us in an endless torrent of hospital […]

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June 7th, 2020

Hydroxychloroquine Not Effective in Preventing COVID-19 — In Praise of a Negative Clinical Trial

The headlines might read, Malaria Drug Ineffective in Preventing COVID-19 — but that doesn’t do justice to a remarkable clinical trial, just published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. Led by Dr. David Boulware at the University of Minnesota, the study asked this question:  Does hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) prevent the development of COVID-19 in […]

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May 31st, 2020

America the Not So Beautiful Right Now, with a Must-Read Book Suggestion

Have you read W. Kamau Bell’s The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell:  Tales of a 6′ 4″, African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama’s Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian? If you haven’t, may I suggest you put it at the top of your list, and pronto? In addition to being […]

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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 […]

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May 10th, 2020

Thank You to Inpatient Nurses — The People Doing the Most Direct COVID-19 Patient Care

Anyone who does inpatient medicine or surgery knows well the major imbalance in time spent on direct patient care between doctors and nurses. Nurses spend way more time actually with patients than we do — I’m referring to time in the rooms caring for patients. While we round and review charts, document lab test results, […]

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May 6th, 2020

Early Memories of Burton “Bud” Rose, Founder of UpToDate — and Medical Education Visionary

Let’s rewind the clock a bit — OK, a lot. Ancient history. It’s winter, 1986. An interview day for medical residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. A bunch of us nervous medical students sit in a conference room, wearing our interview suits, while Dr. Marshall Wolf tells us what to expect that day. Amazingly, Marshall […]

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April 27th, 2020

Leaked Remdesivir Study Information, Tocilizumab and Sarilumab Trials, and the Hazards of Early COVID-19 Research Findings

In the podcast I did with Helen Branswell — Infectious Diseases and global health reporter for STAT — she mentioned that the flow of scientific information for the COVID-19 pandemic made the commonly cited “drinking from a fire hose” analogy somehow inadequate. Since she’s from Canada, I offered Niagara Falls as an alternative, to which […]

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