Category: Faculty and Staff

Meet our newest blog contributor: Dr. Nicolás Cortés-Penfield

Dr. Nicolás Cortés-Penfield has been with our ID group for just under a year now, and is no stranger to digital and social media, having launched his own blog during fellowship, and a new digital journal club “ID Journal Club” hosted on Twitter. He is now joining our blogging group here at UNMC ID and will be a regular contributor. Learn more about him here.

Apr 6, 2020

At the center of the 2018 West Nile Virus season, UNMC ID physicians encountered an unusual presentation

In 2018, we experienced a particularly severe West Nile Virus season, with an unusually high amount of neuroinvasive disease. Last summer, our senior ID Fellow Dr. Lindsey Rearigh shared an informational blog post about the disease, and more recently, she and Dr. Sara Bares published a case report in the Journal of Neurovirology describing a […]

Mar 23, 2020

Contraception and Antiretroviral Therapy: Important Interactions to Keep in Mind

Dr. Kimberly Scarsi recently published an important study in Lancet HIV: “Antiretroviral therapy and vaginally administered contraceptive hormones: a three-arm, pharmacokinetic study.”  We were excited to learn more about and feature her work! Could you please give us a brief summary of the study you performed? This was a pharmacokinetic evaluation of the effect of […]

Mar 16, 2020

Journal Club: Should vancomycin be given as prophylaxis for Clostridioides difficile infections?

The following is a review by one of our fellows, Dr. Randy McCreery, who at a recent journal club presented a paper by Johnson, et al.: Effectiveness of Oral Vancomycin for Prevention of Healthcare Facility-Onset Clostridioides difficile Infection in Targeted Patients During Systemic Antibiotic Exposure, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 28 September 2019. In addition, Drs. McCreery, Cawcutt, […]

Mar 10, 2020

Freedom is in the Air: My Visit to Sudan, a Born-again Country

Here at UNMC ID, we are thrilled to share the global, and personal efforts, of our faculty. Please take a moment to read this excellent piece by Dr. Nada Fadul; Associate Professor, Division of Infectious Diseases, UNMC Sudan felt different this time. It was the middle of December 2019, the first anniversary of the Sudanese […]

Feb 25, 2020

How Should Clinicians Respond to International Public Health Emergencies?

Dr. Angela Hewlett, Medical Director of the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, recently co-authored an article that appeared in the AMA Journal of Ethics entitled; “How Should Clinicians Respond to International Public Health Emergencies?” Dr. Hewlett shared a brief summary of the paper below: The paper is a case-based analysis of issues surrounding clinicians who respond to international public health […]

Feb 10, 2020

Blood culture contamination–it’s a big deal

Blood cultures are a key diagnostic test to detect bacteremia and appropriately treat patients with sepsis and are performed approximately 30 million times in the United States yearly. Unfortunately, contamination of blood cultures occurs in the 0.5% to 5% of samples (approximately 25% of positive blood cultures are due to contamination) which leads to inappropriate […]

Jan 21, 2020

Farewell 2019…another year of growth for UNMCID

2019 continued the theme of growth for our Division of Infectious Diseases. We have added several new faculty to our group (and still actively hiring), continued to redesign the College of Medicine Infectious Diseases curriculum, established a new Community Infectious Diseases service line, expanded our social media presence, joined and led multiple national Infectious Diseases […]

Dec 30, 2019

Evaluating Next-Generation Melioidosis Diagnostics

In addition to being one of our ID physicians, Dr. James Lawler serves as the Director or International Programs and Innovation at the Global Center for Health Security, a center that will focus on training federal personnel to manage highly infectious diseases, and Director of Clinical and Biodefense Research at the National Strategic Research Institute.  His interest in […]

Dec 23, 2019

PharmToExamTable: What do we know about Etravirine for HIV?

Recently, several of our HIV pharmacist colleagues in our Division of Infectious Diseases at UNMC/Nebraska Medicine, published an invited review in Clinical Pharmacokinetics entitled: Clinical Pharmacokinetics and Pharmacodynamics of Etravirine: An Updated Review.  The first author, Dr. Josh Havens PharmD, wrote this summary describing the review article. What prompted the review? This was an invited […]

Dec 17, 2019

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