July 2020: One Year Later
Apologies to all the first-year medical students who were 8 years old when this reference came out.
Well, I am finally ready to get this website back up and running.
There are a few reasons I haven’t been doing journal reviews for nearly a year: a global pandemic, having just had a new daughter, and my own bad brain chemistry trying to grapple with, well, *gesticulates toward the world*. Most of all though, it turns out that it is much easier to have a 20hr/week side hobby when you are a childless ID fellow in the middle of multiple research years rather than a full-time faculty member with a dozen committee appointments and two young kids. So, to keep this project sustainable, I’ve decided to narrow its focus. Here are the changes effective now:
1. I am reducing the number of ID journals I will scan for articles from 30 to 21. To do this, I looked at 6 months’ worth of journal reviews I’d previously done here and counted up the number of times I pulled from each journal. Any journal cited less than five times got the axe, except for AJTMH and STD, which I spared for being (IMO) especially important journals in their respective niches.
I also added four Orthopedic journals (Journal of Arthroplasty, Clinical Orthopedics and Related Research, The Bone & Joint Journal, and Journal of bone and joint infection) because these days I’m mostly an Ortho ID doc, and frankly I can’t justify putting in the work on this if it’s not keeping me up to date in my own subspecialty. I will reassess every few months with the goal to cull the journal list down to ~20, as 1400 abstracts a month is just too many to read.
2. I am dropping the category “ID Diagnostics”; articles on this topic will be folded into General ID. I am replacing it with the category “Orthopedic ID” for the same reason given above.
3. The monthly intro posts will be shorter, and will mostly not be “deep dives” with multiple references going forward.
4. Most significantly: rather than aim for 4-5 reviews per category per month, I will now aim for at least 2 “full” reviews per category, and when there are more papers in a given category I really want you to know about, the rest will get the short paragraph / brief mention treatment.
5. Finally, I am removing the opt-in listserv for email notification that the website is updated. This is just an extra layer of work for that I don’t have time to do. Check the site every month or so, or just follow me on Twitter, where I’ll continue to post notifications about updates.
One additional note: I largely won’t be writing about COVID-19, in part because there are *so* many other people online who are doing that quite well, and because I prefer to help disseminate useful COVID-19 info through our monthly Twitter journal club sessions, and also because I am not interested in receiving death threats every time I point out that a Frenchman doesn’t know how to interpret or report the output of his PCR.
Finally, I am very grateful to my colleagues Drs. Laila Woc-Coburn, Ilhan Schwartz, Todd McCarty, and Brad Cutrell, with whom I’ve been able to keep contributing to the global twitter ID journal clubs (@IDJClub and #IDJClub) throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This has been a great and important way for me to stay “in the game” for the past several months.
That’s it! Here’s this month’s round-up of the literature:
General ID this month covers oral antibiotics for CNS abscess, the value of FDG-PET in S.aureus bacteremia, how bad is persistent gram-negative bacteremia (spoiler: it’s bad!) and the decline in surgical management of IE after institution of public surgical outcomes reporting.
Antimicrobial Agents research this month included adjunctive daptomycin for MSSA bacteremia, baloxavir for influenza prophylaxis among case contacts, rates of VRE after oral vancomycin vs metronidazole for C.difficile, rifampin in prosthetic valve IE, fosfomycin for pyelonephritis, and phages for PJI.
The first-ever Orthopedic ID section includes rates of PJI after early “aseptic” revision, the value of platelet and lymphocyte ratios as a marker of PJI, and the adequacy of 1-year followup in PJI research.
HIV and STI work reviewed this month included a trial of education about chronic opioid prescribing in PLWHIV providers, HIV’s association with risk of dementia in older adults, switching to BIC/TAF/FTC in people suppressed on DTG+TAF/FTC is safe, and the dismal rates of STI screening in MSM on PrEP.
Oncology and Transplant ID this month covers the limited utility of serum BDG for diagnosis of PJP in patients with cancer, variable manifestations of skin disease following solid organ transplantation in people of color, and giving isavuconazole capsules via ETT.
Antimicrobial Stewardship and Infection Control research included LOS and mortality reductions associated with adherence to institutional guidelines for CAP and cellulitis, the data behind mask decontamination protocols, rates of S.aureus surgical infection, and the psychological underpinnings of clinician’s love for the antibiotics that cause C.difficile.
As always, feel free to share your thoughts by commenting on any of these blog posts, or reach out to me directly by email at contact.idjournalclub@gmail.com or via Twitter at @Cortes_Penfield.