HIV and ID Observations

July 12th, 2011

A Thank You to Nice Patients

Yesterday I saw one of my favorite long-term patients. She’s just wonderful, and it’s always a joy to see her. Here are some reasons: She’s uniformly nice — not just to me, but to all the nurses and social workers and other support staff in our clinic. She shows up on time for her appointments. […]

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July 3rd, 2011

Proof That We Are Not French

In case you were worrying about fading American national identity as we celebrate July 4, did you see this detail on a recent E. coli O104:H4 outbreak from France? More recently, at least 15 people in Bordeaux, in southwestern France, appear to have been infected with the strain found in Germany. Most of them have […]

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June 24th, 2011

Reflections on Levofloxacin as it Goes Generic

With the news that a generic form of levofloxacin has just been approved by the FDA, some thoughts about this remarkable antibiotic: When it was first approved in 1996, levofloxacin was the first oral antibiotic that really covered all common causes of community acquired pneumonia. Strep pneumo, H flu, mycoplasma, legionella, chlamydia — check, check, […]

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June 15th, 2011

Hockey Helicobacters

Today’s ID/HIV items come to you courtesy of a winter game being played during a summer month: So it appears that community-based care of HCV augmented by telemedicine is just as good as traditional clinic visits to specialists. My first thought on reading this important paper is that there are undoubtedly lots of ways to […]

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June 13th, 2011

More on Generic Antiretrovirals …

In the recent post on the approval of generic Combivir — and the lack of availability of generic Epivir (lamivudine, 3TC), which was both anticipated and likely to be more useful — I speculated there were several possible causes of this surprising turn of events. But ultimately I concluded, “In sum, the real reason there’s no […]

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June 9th, 2011

E. Coli, ID Doctors, and Fear of Infections

This was going to be about the shiga-toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) outbreak in Germany, and I promise to get there eventually. But to start:  One very useful concept from psychiatry is “reaction formation.” For those of you who have forgotten your college Psych 101, here’s the definition: A psychological defense mechanism in which one form of behavior […]

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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) […]

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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. […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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