HIV and ID Observations

November 27th, 2013

Gynecologists May Treat Men After All

Good news here for gynecologists who screen men for anal cancer: A professional group that certifies obstetrician-gynecologists reversed an earlier directive and said on Tuesday that its members were permitted to treat male patients for sexually transmitted infections and to screen men for anal cancer… It’s always impressive when a group swiftly reverses what is widely perceived […]

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November 23rd, 2013

OB/GYN Board Says Their Docs May Only Treat Women

Here’s a surprising move:  The American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology has decreed that gynecologists may only treat women. From the New York Times coverage: In September, the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology insisted that its members treat only women, with few exceptions, and identified the procedure [high-resolution anoscopy] in which Dr. Stier has expertise as […]

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November 16th, 2013

Janssen to Stop Offering “Virtual Phenotype” Testing, and Musings on Progress

Head over to this page from Janssen Diagnostics, and you’ll receive this little pop-up message: Must say it’s in some ways sad to see it go — in my opinion the nifty work they did correlating genotype results with their database of phenotypes gave the clearest representation of what a genotype actually means. If you didn’t […]

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November 6th, 2013

SINGLE Study Underscores Waning of the Efavirenz Era — But Probably Just in the USA

In today’s New England Journal of Medicine, the SINGLE study finally makes its appearance “in print.”  (The study results were first presented over a year ago.) The highlights: SINGLE was a double-blind, randomized clinical trial comparing abacavir/lamivudine plus dolutegravir to tenofovir/FTC/efavirenz in 833 treatment-naive study subjects. That’s right, three different drugs in each arm — you […]

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October 25th, 2013

GARDEL Two-Active-Drug Study Not a Game-Changer, but Might Be a Paradigm-Shifter

Don’t look now, but a two-drug lamivudine (3TC) + LPV/r strategy did just as well as a standard three-drug regimen of two NRTIs + LPV/r. Better, actually, since virologic outcomes were the same and the two-drug regimen had fewer side effects. Here are the key details about the GARDEL study, presented just this week by Pedro […]

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October 7th, 2013

CD4 Cell Count at Presentation: A Figure with a Depressingly Small Upward Slope

You know how to make an ID/HIV specialist angry? Frustrated? Sigh loudly? Tell a clinical anecdote that involves “late” presentation of HIV diagnosis, in particular someone who has been seeking medical care for various ailments for months or even years without getting tested. You know — it goes something like this: “He was seen 3 years ago for […]

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September 20th, 2013

CROI Abstract Submissions Now Open, and Old CROI Website Still “Lost” in Cyberspace

HIV researchers can now submit their abstracts to the 2014 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections — or “CROI”. (It rhymes with “soy”, as in “soy sauce”; or, if you prefer, “oy”, as in “oy vey”.) Further details here. General submission for abstracts closes on October 8. Meanwhile, people continue to wonder what happened to the now defunct CROI website, […]

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August 1st, 2013

Poll: Will There Be A Shortage of HIV Providers?

Over on NEJM Journal Watch — love that new name — I reviewed a paper on the demographics of people living with AIDS in San Francisco. Bottom line — more than half are now older than 50. Implication — that’s so old! First, it really isn’t, unless you compare it to the dismal era 20+ years ago, when […]

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July 14th, 2013

Will Dolutegravir Instantly Become the Integrase Inhibitor of Choice in Patients with Treatment Failure?

Here’s the short answer : Yes. Probably. And here’s why. In a randomized, double blind clinical trial just published in the Lancet — it’s called SAILING — once-daily dolutegravir was compared to twice daily raltegravir in treatment-experienced patients. The site investigators could choose one or two other fully active agents to develop an optimized background regimen (OBR). […]

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June 27th, 2013

Testing Out the New Website with an ID Link-o-Rama

Hey, new website is live! Interested to hear what you think about our new-ish look. In celebration, here are some quick ID/HIV tidbits that have recently crossed my path, or have been sitting in my inbox for a while, dying to get out: Doxycycline shortage. Hardly anything more frightening to a New England ID doc than a shortage […]

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