HIV and ID Observations

March 28th, 2013

Poll: How Often Do You Measure CD4 Cell Counts?

Over in Clinical Infectious Diseases, a recent study pretty much nails the fact that routine measurement of CD4 cell counts in clinically stable patients is an all but useless exercise.  As summarized by Abbie Zuger in Journal Watch, here’s the key finding: When patients with an unrelated cause for an alteration in CD4-cell count such as […]

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March 10th, 2013

Really Rapid Review — CROI 2013, Atlanta

As noted previously by Carlos del Rio in his nice summary, the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) turned 20 this year. It also made it’s first-ever stop in Atlanta, home of many things that begin with “C” — CDC (note that insiders rarely say, “the CDC”), CNN, Coca Cola, and Carlos himself. I’ll spare […]

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March 5th, 2013

Exploring the Media Fascination with the Baby Cured of HIV

As undoubtedly you’ve heard by now, there’s another person cured of HIV out there — this time, it’s a baby born to an HIV-infected mother. Here’s the story: The mother didn’t know she was HIV positive until delivery, and the baby was found to be infected by both HIV DNA and RNA right at birth. […]

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February 28th, 2013

Guest Post: CROI at 20 — A Look Back

The inimitable Carlos del Rio looks back at our premier scientific meeting, the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), which starts this Sunday: CROI, which started as a small national conference held in a hotel in Washington DC, will hold its 20th meeting this year . When CROI first took place, we had just returned from Berlin, and HIV scientists […]

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February 17th, 2013

An Adherence Intervention That Works — But There’s a Catch

In a previous post, we reviewed the various flavors of medication non-adherence, and concluded with this tantalizing line: Next up:  An Adherence Intervention that Actually Works — But There’s a Catch Well here it is, just published online in JAMA Internal Medicine. Dr. Robert Gross (a long-time HIV adherence researcher from U Penn) and colleagues enrolled 180 patients […]

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February 13th, 2013

Medication Adherence: The Final Frontier

Treatment of HIV has become so amazingly effective that when it fails, it’s no overstatement to say that it’s usually because the patient is not taking the medications.  There are all kinds of provider-related reasons for this — inadequate patient education, prescribing and dispensing errors, failure to address language or education deficits — but here […]

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January 17th, 2013

Why the Results of the C Diff Study (You Know Which One) Were No Surprise

In cased you missed it, fecal transplant — use of poop from a healthy donor, which is then infused into the colon either from above (nasogastric tube) or below (colonoscope) — is unquestionably the most effective treatment for people who have multiple recurrences of C. difficile colitis (C diff). We know this because of a randomized […]

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January 1st, 2013

HIV Incidence: The Latest Numbers

The CDC has recently issued the latest report on HIV incidence (i.e., new infections) in the United States, and as always it’s fascinating to review the numbers. To start, the year-by-year estimated incidence: 2007:  53,200 2008:  47,500 2009:  45,000 2010:  47,500 (38,000 men, 9,500 women) Nope, not much change. Will data from HPTN 052 — published in the […]

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December 5th, 2012

Top HIV Stories of 2012

Somewhere in our genome, we are programmed to use the end of the year as a time to reflect on the previous 12 months — and to make lists! If you don’t believe me, there’s barely a publication or web site out there that hasn’t already succumbed, and we’re just in early December. And what we can […]

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November 7th, 2012

Vitamins and the Department of Bad Timing

Now that the election is over, we can get back to something that really matters — namely vitamins, and specifically whether they really help people. Last month there was a large, well-done study from Tanzania showing that mega-doses of vitamins not only didn’t help those HIV starting ART, but they actually were harmful — LFTs went […]

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