HIV and ID Observations

November 4th, 2018

Your Next ID Cartoon Caption Contest — Yearning for Your Submission

The nice people who write our hospital’s newsletter interviewed me recently about this blog, and we covered a whole lot of territory. How it got started … inspirations … popular posts … fax machines … why an ID doctor from Mexico asked me about my dog Louie. There was, however, a grave omission — nowhere in this […]

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October 2nd, 2018

Winner of Latest Cartoon Contest Proves Again That We ID Specialists Are a Different Breed

It is with a mixture of professional pride and embarrassment that I hereby present the winner of our last ID Cartoon Caption Contest: Yikes. Talk about inside jokes. Though the second-place finisher “Ah, no, I prescribed the AEROSOLIZED, not PARASOL-ized form” mounted a late charge, the geeky reference to Listeria monocytogenes and its “umbrella motility” held out for the win. […]

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June 24th, 2018

A Migrating Facial Worm, and Time to Vote for Your Favorite Cartoon Caption

Over on the New England Journal of Medicine, there’s a picture on the “Images in Clinical Medicine” series that’s getting quite a bit of attention. And it’s no wonder. This 32-year-old woman in Russia went to her ophthalmologist with a series of selfies she took over a 2-week period. The pictures demonstrated nodules (bumps) that moved around her […]

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March 4th, 2018

Winner of ID Cartoon Caption Contest #3, and Here’s #4 Just in Time for CROI

One of the challenging aspects of writing this blog is that there is so much interesting material in the ID/HIV world that sometimes I forget to cover critical items. Example: the winner of the most recent ID Cartoon Caption Contest, which I’m embarrassed to admit, has been awaiting its announcement since late 2016. The winner: It’s a great […]

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November 25th, 2016

ID Cartoon Caption Contest #2 Winner — and a New Contest for the Holidays

Every so often, one of my regular readers (which must number at least a dozen at this point, including my extended family, dog, and cat) asks me where I come up with ideas. The answer, of course, is that there are infinite sources of inspiration in the field of Infectious Diseases — the difficulty is choosing what fascinating topic […]

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June 25th, 2016

ID Cartoon Caption Contest Closed — Time to Vote

The response to our First Ever ID Cartoon Caption Contest was gratifyingly brisk, with hundreds of entries. Not going to lie about this — we were somewhat concerned the response would be silence … you know, as in <<crickets>> … but you readers proved very much up to the task, with numerous funny suggestions. Our sophisticated computer algorithm has […]

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June 19th, 2016

ID Cartoon Caption Contest

The New Yorker magazine is justifiably famous for its fine writing, with its contributors a veritable Who’s Who of famous authors and journalists of the past century. Truman Capote, Ann Beattie, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Dorothy Parker, E.B. White, Philip Roth, Alice Munro, John Hersey, Malcolm Gladwell, Roger Angell, James Thurber … you […]

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