HIV and ID Observations

November 21st, 2022

Five ID Things to Be Grateful For, 2022 Edition

In what’s something of a holiday tradition on this site, I hereby present 5 ID things we can be grateful for as we prepare for the best holiday of the year. Why the best? Family and friends. A nice big meal, with something for everyone. (My family of four has two vegetarians — they have plenty […]

---

November 7th, 2022

Five Quick Questions from Our Course, “ID in Primary Care”

As noted on this site before, we put on a course called “ID in Primary Care” every year for clinicians doing truly the hardest job in medicine — frontline primary care. Why is their work so challenging? While we can focus on one field, infectious diseases, they have to be aware of everything. Tough task indeed. We’ve […]

---

October 25th, 2022

Yes, Even ID Doctors Get COVID — Including Famous Ones

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, various public figures have contracted the disease. Tom Hanks, way back in early March 2020, was arguably the first globally famous person in the world to test positive for the virus. The announcement came right as much of the world prepared to shut down. My friends and I were […]

---

October 17th, 2022

Big In-Person Medical Meetings and Cognitive Dissonance for ID Docs

Dissonance: lack of agreement; inconsistency between the beliefs one holds or between one’s actions and one’s beliefs; a mingling of sounds that strike the ear harshly. It started shortly after the chaotic, disruptive, and all together unpleasant Omicron wave of 2021–22. It continued through the BA.2 and BA.5 surges, and now plays on through the swarm of […]

---

October 10th, 2022

Molnupiravir Results in PANORAMIC Study — It’s Not All Bad News

Last week, the large PANORAMIC trial of COVID-19 treatment in outpatients with mild-moderate disease appeared in a pre-print. This large (25,783 participants!) randomized, open-label study compared molnupiravir vs. usual care in adults 50 or older, or having comorbidities known to make severe disease more likely. The results? Molnupiravir vs standard of care for outpts with Covid19. No […]

---

September 28th, 2022

Even if You Think “The Pandemic Is Over” — Let’s Make In-Person Meetings Safer

“The pandemic is over.” Someone very famous used these words recently, triggering all kinds of controversy. While most ID clinicians groaned at the comment, knowing that it would be taken out of context, repeated in headlines without any of the President’s cautionary statements, and fuel COVID denialists, it’s also worth acknowledging that most of the country really […]

---

September 8th, 2022

A Back To Work ID Link-o-Rama

A few nuggets are rattling around in the inbox post Labor Day, including this extraordinary photo of our family dogs Zelda, Zoe, and Louie, posing for their latest album cover. Woof! Besides, I haven’t done one of these Link-o-Ramas since January 11, 2021! That was either 20 months ago or 20 years, hard to keep track of […]

---

August 8th, 2022

Long-Acting Injectable HIV Therapy for People Who Won’t Take ART?

HIV treatment is so spectacularly effective that you might be surprised to hear that some people with HIV still have uncontrolled viral replication. We HIV clinicians watch with frustration and sadness as they experience progressive immunodeficiency, complications from advanced HIV disease, hospitalizations, and HIV-related deaths. Plus, while viremic, they continue to risk transmitting the virus […]

---

July 1st, 2022

Fellowship Transition and Developing a Sense of Belonging

It’s July 1, which means that today, or sometime very soon, many internal medicine residents will transition to becoming subspecialty fellows. There are many appropriate words to describe this change, including exciting, nerve-wracking, and challenging, but one that doesn’t get quite enough attention is how strangely lonely it feels. The reason this sensation occurs is because […]

---

June 21st, 2022

Mayo Clinic Study on Paxlovid Outcomes is Reassuring — but Likely Underestimates Rebound Rate

Over at Clinical Infectious Diseases, researchers from the Mayo Clinic published a retrospective analysis of nirmatrelvir/r (Paxlovid) treatment, with a careful review of each patient’s chart. The goal was to determine the clinical outcomes after the 5-day treatment course, with a focus on the frequency of rebounds — a topic of great clinical interest but with little […]

---