An ongoing dialogue on HIV/AIDS, infectious diseases,
August 24th, 2011
Hepatitis C and … Baseball?
From the prolific folks at NATAP came this surprising announcement: The Cardinals are stepping up to the plate against Hepatitis C. Starting Monday, August 22, fans will be able to get free Hepatitis C screenings at Busch Stadium. It’s part of a nationwide effort by Major League Baseball to bring attention to the causes and treatment of […]
July 28th, 2011
Really Rapid Review — IAS 2011 Rome
Just back from IAS 2011 (which was followed, I’m thrilled to say, with a visit to perhaps the most beautiful region in the world). Here is a Really Rapid Review™ of the meeting, with apologies ahead of time for lack of organization and (even more likely) leaving out something important. FYI, the abstracts are online […]
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. […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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) […]
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. […]