HIV and ID Observations

October 4th, 2011

Spanish HIV Vaccine Story Gets Lots of Attention — Here’s Why

If you’re looking for a good way to pass the time while running errands, traveling, or walking to work, I highly recommend the Freakonomics podcasts, which have taught me all sorts of interesting things. Such as the fact that suicide is more common than murder in the USA, but gets way less attention. And how a […]

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October 3rd, 2011

CASCADE: When to Start, (Yet) Another Take

As we await the enrollment, analysis, and results of the START study — which is randomizing patients with CD4>500 to start HIV therapy  vs waiting until the CD4 falls to 350 — much of the research on “when to start” ART in patients with high CD4’s comes from observational studies. Several have already been published […]

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September 24th, 2011

Warning: Viral Replication is Hazardous to Your Health

When studies evaluate the prognostic importance of measuring HIV viral load, they generally do so by assessing a single measurement rather than values obtained longitudinally.  One obvious limitation of this approach is that baseline VL poorly predicts outcome after ART initiation — a finding in stark contrast to the original description of VL from the […]

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September 4th, 2011

“Novel” Approaches to Initial HIV Therapy: Part II

Two studies were just published on alternative strategies for initial HIV therapy. I’ve already reviewed the first one here. The second paper is a single-arm (n=112) study of darunavir/r (once daily) plus raltegravir, the latest riff on the “NRTI sparing” approach. As I mentioned when I first covered this study, the high rate of virologic failure — […]

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September 3rd, 2011

“Novel” Approaches to Initial HIV Therapy: Part I

It’s been several years since the “preferred” or “recommended” initial regimens for HIV treatment have been consolidated into one of the following four: TDF/FTC + efavirenz TDF/FTC + atazanavir/r TDF/FTC + darunavir/r TDF/FTC + raltegravir Any room for improvement in this “TDF/FTC + key third drug” approach? With the recent approval of TDF/FTC/rilpivirine, certainly this will […]

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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 […]

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July 20th, 2011

CROI 2012 Dates Now Official: March 5-8, Seattle

Good news for coffee lovers!

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July 13th, 2011

More Favorable Results on PrEP, But …

As part of the usual flurry of studies released just before major scientific meetings, results of two pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) trials in heterosexual men and women have just been made public: In the CDC TDF2 study, 1200 HIV-uninfected men and women in Botswana were randomized to take oral tenofovir/FTC or placebo daily. Tenofovir/FTC was found to reduce the […]

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July 5th, 2011

Unofficial CROI 2012 Dates: March 4-10, in Seattle

No, there’s nothing up yet (as of July 5, 2011) on the official CROI web site. But someone was kind enough to send me this link that lists upcoming meetings in Seattle.  Here’s an extract: Note that only those events with green shading are “Definite.” And since these dates haven’t yet been confirmed by the CROI-meisters, it’s […]

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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 been […]

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