HIV and ID Observations

September 18th, 2009

Integrase Inhibitors: In Search of an Abbreviation

The alphabet soup that characterizes HIV therapeutics has always been one of its quirky challenges — for example, who could possibly know that 3TC, CBV, TZV, EPZ, and LAM all refer to drugs that are (or contain) lamivudine? This drives our ID fellows nuts, and is certainly a strong deterrent to non-HIV specialists to learning the field. […]

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November 2nd, 2008

The Big HIV News from ICAAC/IDSA

Tons of interesting stuff at this year’s combined ICAAC/IDSA meeting, most of it in non-HIV related Infectious Diseases.  In aggregate, literally hundreds of posters, presentations, and symposia on MRSA, C diff, osteomyelitis, complicated UTIs, hospital-acquired pneumonia, antibiotic resistance … It’s a great meeting to catch up on general ID, and the literature review sessions alone […]

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April 10th, 2008

Needed: Something Better than “HAART”

I think we all have pet peeves, and so I’ll confess one of mine: I hate the term “HAART.” (I work with someone, by the way, who hates the term “viral load,” preferring “virus load.” Go figure.) Standing for “highly active antiretroviral therapy,” HAART first surfaced in the mid-1990s in order to distinguish potent anti-HIV treatment from the older, not-so-active form […]

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