HIV and ID Observations

June 4th, 2011

HIV Epidemiology and Something Even Many Smart Medical Students Don’t Know

Periodically I like to give an informal quiz to the medical students about HIV epidemiology. It’s a multiple choice question that goes something like this: Based on the recent epidemiology of HIV in the United States, in what group are new cases of HIV infection rising the fastest? Men who have sex with men (MSM) Injection drug […]

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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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December 5th, 2008

New Case Definition for HIV Infection? Yawn …

The CDC has revised its case definition for HIV infection and AIDS, so that now laboratory evidence — a positive antibody test, or detectable HIV RNA or DNA – is required for the diagnosis. It’s not intended to guide clinical practice, but still — what took them so long?  A clinical diagnosis of AIDS was only necessary […]

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November 30th, 2008

How to End the HIV Epidemic

Answer:  Put everyone on treatment. Conspicuously absent for decades, the prevention part of the “when to start antiviral therapy?” question has now moved front and center in two recent papers:  In this week’s Lancet, a group from the WHO estimated what would happen if there were annual universal HIV testing, and then immediate treatment for all […]

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April 17th, 2008

Required Reading: Bat-Related Human Rabies

A group of researchers in Canada have done infectious diseases experts a big favor — they’ve summarized a staggering amount of useful data on bat-related cases of human rabies in a paper just published in Clinical Infectious Diseases. (Note to non-ID specialists: infectious diseases doctors spend a lot of time answering questions about rabies in general […]

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