In what is breaking news today in the field of medicine, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced that activated drotrecogin alfa (XIGRIS) is to be pulled off all markets including the United States. This drug, intended to treat severe sepsis, has been shown in the new PROWESS-SHOCK trial to be no better than placebo in […]
Bacteria are laughing at us!
I came across a nice article in the October issue of the Atlantic titled Resistance is Futile. It attempts to describe the problem of antibiotic resistance from an economic viewpoint. While I don’t understand all those nuances, despite my couple semesters of economics in college, I still think it’s an overall good read. I loved […]
HIV Transmitted from Living Organ Donor
This weeks CDC MMWR reports an unfortunate case where a patient with kidney failure who received a kidney transplant from a living donor also acquired HIV/AIDS. The case, the first of its kind since 1989, is remarkable not because we don’t know that organ transplantation come with risks but rather it highlights the inadequacies of […]
HIV in the Elderly Revisited
It is World AIDS Day and everywhere you look there’s an article touching upon some aspect of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This summer, I wrote a post on HIV in the older age groups prompted by a study that showed that older men taking erectile dysfunction drugs (eg. Viagra) had twice the rate of sexually transmitted illnesses […]
Irresponsible Journalism – PrEP for HIV
The New England Journal of Medicine today reported the results of a trial in which 2499 HIV-seronegative men or transgender women who were at high risk for HIV acquisition were enrolled to either receive daily emtricitabine plus tenofovir or placebo. The results were that those who received the anti-retroviral medications had a 44% reduction in HIV […]