HIV and ID Observations

June 4th, 2011

HIV Epidemiology and Something Even Many Smart Medical Students Don’t Know

Periodically I like to give an informal quiz to the medical students about HIV epidemiology. It’s a multiple choice question that goes something like this: Based on the recent epidemiology of HIV in the United States, in what group are new cases of HIV infection rising the fastest? Men who have sex with men (MSM) Injection drug […]

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June 2nd, 2011

Original XMRV/CFS Paper Almost, Sort-of Retracted by Science

From the pages of Science In this week’s edition of Science Express, we are publishing two Reports that strongly support the growing view that the association between XMRV and CFS described by Lombardi et al. likely reflects contamination of laboratories and research reagents with the virus … Because the validity of the study by Lombardi et al. is […]

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May 23rd, 2011

Rilpivirine Approved — the “iPod” of NNRTIs?

From the FDA on Friday (it’s always on Friday, isn’t it): FDA approved Edurant (rilpivirine) 25 mg tablets, a new non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI) for the treatment of HIV. Rilpivirine is an antiviral drug that helps to block reverse transcriptase, an enzyme necessary for HIV replication. The recommended dose of rilpivirine is one 25 mg […]

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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 28th, 2011

Hepatitis C Week is Upon Us

After many — and I mean many — years of telling patients that new hepatitis C drugs were “coming soon,” that time has finally come. An FDA Advisory Panel yesterday favorably reviewed the HCV protease inhibitor boceprevir; today telaprevir got the same unanimous report. The FDA will  certainly follow with approval for both drugs, and hence […]

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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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April 5th, 2011

Scamming Academic Journals

Academic scams are not just limited to meetings. Every so often, I receive an e-mail that goes something like this: Dear Dr. Sax, The journal Contemporary Organic Biosynthesis [journal name made up] covers all the latest and outstanding developments in organic biosynthesis studies. It is one of the leading journals for expert reviews in the field. Please visit […]

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