For several weeks, a 33-year-old man has had an asymptomatic lesion on the head of the penis. He has had a new sex partner in the past few months but is unaware of any health problems she may have. What is the likely cause of this lesion? More »
When taking a patient’s sexual history, I find that the question “How many partners do you have?” rarely elicits a complete picture. Instead, I ask, “How many partners have you had in the past 6 months?” This usually reveals when patients have engaged in serial monogamy and creates an environment in... More »
No matter what primary care demographic your practice represents, it would be most unusual not to encounter patients infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV). Since HCV infection is chronic and can lead to cirrhosis (occurring in 20% of patients over a period of 10 to 20 years), decisions regarding its... More »
Cancer killed a 14-year-old girl who died shortly after being given Cervarix as part of a national immunization program. Early reports speculated that there may have been a link between the shot and her death, but according to a coroner’s assessment, there was no indication that the culprit was the... More »
The seroprevalence of hepatitis is no higher in patients with recent-onset polyarthritis than in the general population. Therefore, screening patients for hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection when evaluating them for polyarthritis suggestive of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is... More »
A TOPICAL TREATMENT THAT KILLS herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) and that has long staying power may be available in the future. The experimental microbicidal solution, consisting of cholesterol-conjugated small interfering RNA (chol-siRNA), was tested in female mice that were given a lethal dose... More »
A 30-year-old white man with HIV infection since September 2004 presented to his infectious disease physician in January 2007 to restart his antiretroviral therapy. Three months earlier, he had discontinued all of his antiretroviral medications because of his loss of health insurance. He remained... More »
The angry mother of a 15-year-old girl has called the office multiple times asking for the laboratory
results from her daughter’s office visit last week and demanding to know whether the teen was “put on the pill.” Along with other lab work, tests for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and... More »
Women’s healthcare company Hologic received FDA premarket approval for Cervista HPV HR test and the Cervista HPV 16/18 test. The tests are manufactured by Third Wave Technologies. The high-risk Cervista HPV HR test has been approved to screen patients with atypical squamous cells of undetermined... More »
