HIV and ID Observations

October 29th, 2010

With HIV Medication Adherence, It’s Not a Competition

There has been an irresistable urge for people — doctors, public health officers, politicians, journalists, the usual pundits — to compare adherence to HIV treatment in resource-rich vs. resource-limited setting.  I suspect this is because the whole issue got off to a famously bad start in 2001, when then-head of  the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Andrew Natsios […]

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October 22nd, 2010

How to Figure Out the Length of Antibiotic Therapy

One thing we ID doctors know — that other clinicians simply don’t — is how long to treat a patient with antibiotics. I was reminded of this special power by these recent events: An excellent fellow from the hospital’s Critical Care program rotated through our division recently.  When asked about what she wanted learn from the elective, the […]

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October 7th, 2010

Post-Halladay Video Treat: Prospects for HIV Cure

For a little entertainment between playoff games — but how could anyone beat the guy in the picture? — you might want to check out this interview I did with Dan Kuritzkes about the prospects for an HIV cure. So which do you think we’ll see first — an HIV cure or a vaccine?  And I don’t mean an […]

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October 1st, 2010

Five Friday Fasciolas

As we await either the start of the baseball playoffs (or Spring Training), here is some ID/HIV content to consider, in no particular order: Could adenovirus infection be the cause of obesity?  That would be the media take, especially from this highly-esteemed research journal, The New York Daily News. (Warning:  kind of ugly photo in link.)  […]

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September 6th, 2010

Treating Cellulitis: Getting the Answer Wrong and Right

What’s the right antibiotic choice for cellulitis in the era of community-acquired MRSA? As astutely pointed out by Anne in her comment, the “correct” answer to the recertification question was #4, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, for the following reason: I am not a doctor, I am a test developer. Having exactly zero knowledge about the content here (could be Chinese […]

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August 30th, 2010

Required Reading: In Love and “Serodiscordant”

Being of a certain age, my wife and I still subscribe to the print version of the Sunday New York Times.  Since we also get the local rag, quite a bit of paper is deposited on our doorstep each week. Worth it?  You bet, especially since occasionally there’s a gem in there like this week’s Modern […]

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August 26th, 2010

Lyme Cases Up — Anecdotes, True Epidemiology, and More Anecdotes

All of us New England-based ID doctors (and internists and family practitioners and pediatricians and NPs/PAs in primary care) who have been in practice a while will tell you that Lyme cases have been increasing for years. And it’s not just the number of cases, it’s also where and when they are occurring.  A few years ago […]

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August 10th, 2010

Curbside Consults: The Yin and the Yang

One of the simultaneously most enjoyable and exasperating aspects of being an Infectious Disease specialist is the large volume of “curbside” consultations we get from colleagues. For example, here’s this week’s talley — and it’s only Tuesday — done from memory and without systematically keeping track of emails, pages, phone calls, etc.: Duration of antibiotics after urosepsis, […]

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August 3rd, 2010

HIV Testing: NY Makes Progress; Massachusetts … Not So Much

From the office of New York Governor David Paterson: The Governor signed into law S.8227/A.11487, which will allow patients to agree to HIV testing as part of a general signed consent to medical care that remains in effect until it is revoked or expires. The bill will also, among other things:  allow oral consent to an HIV […]

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July 30th, 2010

Perinatal Transmission of HIV “Solved” — Now How Do We Pay For It?

Conspicuously absent from this year’s International AIDS Conference were major studies on prevention of maternal-to-child transmission. It could be that I just missed them, so I emailed a colleague who specializes in the area, and she concurred: Nope, did not see or hear major PMTCT updates at IAS. The thing is, this problem has been all but solved, […]

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