Infectious Diseases

Host: Maurice Pickard, MD

STDs are widespread in all walks of life, regardless of gender, race, social status, or education. Seduced into complacency by the notion that "it can't happen to me" many sexually active teens and young adults are stunned when they are diagnosed with an STD.

In Seductive Delusions: How Everyday People Catch STDs, author and physician Dr. Jill Grimes reveals the truths about sexually transmitted diseases through narrated accounts of young men and women, their exam room conversations with doctors, and both the physical symptoms and the emotional reactions that can accompany infection.

Host: Matt Birnholz, MD

Meningitis is one of the most feared manifestations of infectious disease for the medical community. Yet in spite of this fact, there are very few educational or advocacy-based resources dedicated to increasing public and professional awareness for meningococcal disease and updated prevention methods.

Dr. Matt Birnholz talks with Lynn Bozof, cofounder and President of the National Meningitis Association, an organization fully dedicated to meningitis education and prevention. They discuss her family’s tragic experience with the deadly disease, the preventive mission that originated from this loss, and ongoing efforts to educate clinicians and patients on the need for vaccinations and boosters.

Host: John Russell, MD

In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause celebre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their names--and opened their pocketbooks--in hopes of stopping the disease. Still, in a time when every emergent disease inspires waves of panic, why aren't we doing more to tame one of our oldest foes? And how does a pathogen that we've known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly one million of them?

In The Fever, journalist Sonia Shah sets out to answer those questions, delivering a timely, inquisitive chronicle of the illness and its influence on human lives. Dr. John Russell hosts this fascinating discussion about her book.

Host: Matt Birnholz, MD

In the ongoing global campaign to prevent, treat, and cure HIV and AIDS, there have been countless therapeutic approaches targeting the HIV virus and everything it interacts with on the path to infection. But after decades of relentless infectivity claiming over 25 million lives, what if we could one day simply edit and delete the HIV virus right out of existence?

Joining Dr. Matt Birnholz to discuss a novel research effort to leverage gene editing technology in the fight against HIV is Dr. Kamel Khalili, Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience, Director of the Center for Neuro-virology, and Director of the Comprehensive Neuro-AIDS Center at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University.

[Read the Article]

Recent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases in the United States have prompted clinicians, public health officials and the public to pay closer attention to the growing phenomenon of vaccine refusal. A new study looks at the role of vaccine refusal and the risk of measles and pertussis. In recent years, a substantial proportion of US measles cases occurred in people who were intentionally unvaccinated. Vaccine refusal was also found to be associated with an increased risk of pertussis in some populations.

[Watch more videos of The JAMA Report]

Host: John Russell, MD

Over the past fifty years, more than three hundred infectious diseases have either newly emerged or reemerged, appearing in territories where they’ve never been seen before. Ninety percent of epidemiologists expect that one of them will cause a deadly pandemic sometime in the next two generations. But which one, and how?

In Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, prizewinning journalist Sonia Shah interweaves history, original reportage, and personal narrative to explore the origins of contagions, drawing parallels between cholera, one of history’s most deadly and disruptive pandemic-causing pathogens, and the new diseases that stalk humankind today.

Guest: Anthony S. Fauci, MD

This week on Conversations on Health Care, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Fauci is world renowned for his work battling HIV/AIDS and discusses the current efforts at NIAID, along with other global agencies, to contain and control the Zika pandemic.

Host: Thomas C. Wright, Jr., MD

How should clinicians educate patients on recommended timing intervals for receiving pap smears based on updated guidelines? And for those patients who receive a positive HPV test, what counseling strategies and treatment pathways would be most helpful?

Joining Dr. Thomas Wright from Omnia Education's Women's Health Annual Visit in Boston, MA is Dr. Dana Gossett, Division Chief of General Obstetrics and Gynecology at Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation and Associate Professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

[Read the Article]

Sepsis is a clinical syndrome of physiologic, pathologic, and biochemical abnormalities caused by serious infection. Sepsis is a major public health concern. Besides being a leading cause of mortality worldwide, sepsis accounted for more than $20 billion of U.S. hospital costs in 2011. In addition, there is increasing awareness that patients who survive sepsis are often left with long-term disabilities.

Updated definitions and clinical criteria for sepsis should help promote earlier recognition and more timely treatment of patients with sepsis or suspected sepsis. In a related study, researchers reviewed the electronic health records of more than one million patients to assess the usefulness of a clinical score known as "SOFA", which is used to help identify patients with sepsis.

[Watch more videos of The JAMA Report]

Host: Brian P. McDonough, MD, FAAFP

Reporting from the Caribbean island of Bonaire, Dr. Brian McDonough provides an update on local public sentiments and concerns around the continuing spread of Zika virus infections across the world.