HIV and ID Observations

It is with a mixture of professional pride and embarrassment that I hereby present the winner of our last ID Cartoon Caption Contest:

“You have Listeria meningitis.”

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.

Let’s pause for a moment to consider the sheer obscurity of this winning caption:

• It involves Listeria monocytogenes — a relatively rare infection (despite its prominence in medical school curricula).
• It requires knowing that listeria causes meningitis. Astute observers of the cartoon will note that the umbrella may be in the lining of the guy’s brain.
• Finally — and easily most obscurely — you have to know that when listeria is inoculated vertically into soft motility agar, growth of the organism produces umbrella-like lateral extensions from the stab line.

Ha ha!

Special thanks to Sébastien Poulin for being the first to submit it, and doing so all the way from Canada. That couldn’t have been easy, what with the latest controversies in US-Canada relations.

As is customary, Sebastien will receive a lifetime free subscription to this blog. Perhaps he’ll even come this week to the annual gathering of ID nerds like him in San Francisco to pick up his prize.

Not surprisingly, the caption completely baffled my sister Anne, creator of the above cartoon (and not an ID doctor). She had no idea she was going to elicit listeria associations with her skillful and silly drawing. Our astute editors at NEJM Journal Watch were similarly perplexed, but too embarrassed to ask me to explain the joke.

(Now do you get it?)

While we’re all enjoying that bit of ID-related humor — and we are, aren’t we? — allow me to share this spot-on parody of how we ID doctors can obsess over obscure details (like umbrella motility) when sometimes those consulting us just want to know what to do:

For the record, that’s Brown medical resident Zoe Weiss, poking affectionate fun at her revered ID attending Dimitrios Farmakiotis.

(All “actors” gave permission to post this video, by the way. Send the lawyers away.)

And since Zoe made the best possible choice when it comes to her upcoming subspecialty training (ID, of course), she will one day play the same important role as Dimitrios — lecturing, um I mean teaching, impressionable residents.

Hope to see you at IDWeek!