HIV and ID Observations

April 12th, 2020

IDSA’s COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Highlight Difficulty of “Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There”

The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) gathered a series of experts for what were undoubtedly many late-night calls, reviews of published and pre-print literature, and revisions (of revisions), and admirably generated a set of treatment guidelines for COVID-19. The problem — there is no proven effective treatment for COVID-19. That is, there’s no proven treatment based […]

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March 6th, 2020

CROI 2020 Will Be a “Virtual Meeting” After All — Plus, What Scares Me (and Doesn’t) About Coronavirus

This just in: BREAKING NEWS: #CROI2020 will be a virtual meeting this year! Thanks to @IAS_USA @DonnaJacobsen and all CROI leadership for wrestling with this difficult decision and putting public health first. https://t.co/KPmJ66x7GL — Melanie Thompson (@drmt) March 6, 2020 If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you might have read here just minutes ago that […]

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February 25th, 2020

First Week on Service, with One-a-Day ID Learning Units

There is almost always something to be learned from every new patient. It might be buried somewhere in the history, or the physical, or the lab tests, or the micro, or the imaging — but the odds are excellent that, with enough rumination, you’ll find it. I can’t remember now who taught me this important fact, or […]

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February 17th, 2020

Short-Course Treatment of Latent TB, Combination Therapy for Staph Bacteremia, Adult Vaccine Guidelines, Novel Antifungals, and Others — A Non-COVID-19 ID Link-o-Rama

There’s so much out there right now on COVID-19 (the disease) and SARS-CoV-2 (the virus) that the other ID news gets crowded out. Which means it’s time for non-COVID-19 ID/HIV Link-o-Rama! I haven’t done one of these in a while, so there’s plenty of material in the vaults yearning to be free. The CDC now recommends short-course, […]

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February 2nd, 2020

A Coronavirus ID Link-o-Rama, Because I’m Not Watching the Super Bowl

With so much of the ID-related news out there dominated by the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV, hard to type) outbreak, it seems appropriate to collect some of the more interesting or useful findings in this busy past week. Think of it as an ID Link-o-Rama — Special Novel Coronavirus Edition. As with last week’s post, an important caveat […]

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January 6th, 2020

The Decade’s Top 10 Biggest Changes to ID Clinical Practice

Here’s a question for you ID and HIV and other clinicians out there as you start 2020 — what are the 10 biggest changes to ID/HIV clinical practice over the past 10 years? Not necessarily what are the biggest stories or biggest advances (though they certainly are eligible) — but more specifically, when you are seeing […]

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December 23rd, 2019

FDA Defers Approval of First Long-Acting HIV Therapy, Surprising Everyone

We HIV/ID specialists are lucky. For over two decades, steady progress in HIV treatment brings regular excitement to our field. Some of these advances are incremental, but others represent major leaps forward. One such example of the latter is long-acting injectable therapy with cabotegravir (CAB) and rilpivirine (RPV) for maintaining viral suppression. This strategy — two […]

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December 1st, 2019

On World AIDS Day 2019 — Wouldn’t It Be Nice…?

With apologies to a 1960s band with a flair for complex harmonies and evoking warm ocean breezes (as the first winter storm barrels in), here’s a miscellaneous list of wishes for World AIDS Day. Wouldn’t It Be Nice … If everyone with HIV could be on suppressive antiretroviral therapy? Here are the latest estimates, showing we’re […]

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November 25th, 2019

Vaccine Defenders, U=U Holds Up, Zika Is Gone, and Other ID Things to Be Grateful For, 2019 Edition

An excellent episode of the Freakonomics podcast introduced me to the headwinds vs tailwinds asymmetry, and how we humans perceive life. It goes like this: We go for a walk, a run, or a bike ride, and the wind faces us dead-on, making the exercise a struggle. (In windy Boston, the wind is always in my face. Always […]

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November 11th, 2019

When TV Gets ID Wrong — Or At Least Not Quite Right

A busy week for Infectious Diseases on television! First, Dr. Aditya Shah, an ID doctor at Mayo Clinic, treated us to several snippets of truly idiotic ID-related drama in a network television show. After seeing them, I commented: Hey, my services to this show to help you talk about infectious diseases without sounding dumb are available at a […]

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