HIV and ID Observations

November 17th, 2010

Ferlater Antibiotics

In this absolutely hysterical, laugh-out-loud comedy routine, Mal Z. Lawrence describes a woman at a Catskill hotel, piling danish into her handbag. She calls them “ferlater danish” — as opposed to the ones she’s eating at breakfast, those are “fernow.” Did you ever have one of your patients request “ferlater” antibiotics?  That is, ask that […]

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November 7th, 2010

Welcome to the Click-Fest

Let me start by confessing I’m something of a gadget freak.  I was an early Palm Pilot adoptor, loved the iPod from the get-go, and need to avoid CNET, Engadget, Gizmodo, and David Pogue’s columns for the New York Times when deadlines loom. Not surprisingly, I embraced the shift to electronic medical records (EMRs) enthusiastically. […]

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November 4th, 2010

XMRV and CFS: More Yay and Nay

Does XMRV cause Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?  Or more accurately, is it even associated with CFS? I’ve been putting off writing about this for a while, as I knew colleagues of mine had a paper in press on the topic, and I wanted the dust to settle a bit more on the controversy. But of course […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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