HIV and ID Observations

March 18th, 2019

Just 1 Month of TB Preventive Therapy Works for People with HIV in TB-Endemic Regions — How About Other People in Other Places?

There’s a look our patients frequently give us when we tell them that preventive therapy for tuberculosis involves 9 months of treatment. If I were to put that look into words, they would be: Yikes, Doc, 9 months is waaay too long — you must be out of your mind. It’s the “9 months?!?!” face. We’ve […]

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October 20th, 2016

Back to School: Questions from “ID in Primary Care” — Shared and Answered!

Once again, we’re giving our “Infectious Diseases in Primary Care” post-graduate course in beautiful Boston — where the weather is perfect, the air crisp and clear, and we are all watching with excitement as the few remaining baseball teams and presidential candidates make a mad dash to the end of their respective races. (You might have heard something […]

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December 8th, 2011

Big TB Prevention Study Important, Highly Relevant — Even Here

As I’ve noted before, tuberculosis is disappearing from the United States — which means that the bulk of cutting-edge research in TB (both clinical and basic science) has little relevance to US-based practitioners. But over in NEJM, a much-anticipated TB study is published today that is highly relevant: We conducted an open-label, randomized noninferiority trial comparing 3 […]

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October 23rd, 2011

TB, Timing of Antiretroviral Therapy, and Being a Lumper Rather Than a Splitter

Three key papers on timing of ART in patients with TB have just been published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Fortunately, Carlos Del Rio has done a bang-up job summarizing them in Journal Watch AIDS Clinical Care. And if you’re wondering how we got our title for Carlos’ piece, here’s an e-mail between our Executive Editor to me […]

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March 24th, 2010

Now for Some Good News: TB Cases Continue to Decline

From the latest MMWR: This figure speaks for itself, but two sentences from the Editorial Note deserve highlighting: The 11.4% decrease in reported TB rate in 2009 is the largest single-year decrease ever recorded. From 1953 to 1993, the single largest annual percentage decrease in TB case rate was 11.1% in 1956 Since I started my ID career […]

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