Division of Infectious Diseases
Should We Add Daptomycin to β-Lactams in the Initial Treatment of Methicillin-susceptible S. aureus Bacteremia?
Content from Dr. Razan El Ramahi, originally posted in IDSA journal club. Despite the availability of active antibiotics to treat Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia (SAB), controversy still exists regarding the optimal antibiotic strategy and whether combination antibiotics improve outcomes. In small clinical studies, a possible benefit was observed by adding daptomycin to β-lactams in the treatment of SAB. However, […]
Jan 28, 2020
Novel Coronavirus – What You Need to Know Now
Content courtesy of Dr. Angela Hewlett Coronaviruses are common respiratory pathogens, and generally cause mild symptoms of the ‘common cold’. However, other coronavirus strains have been known to cause outbreaks that lead to more severe disease like pneumonia, and even death. Examples of these include SARS and MERS, which are both coronaviruses with mortality rates […]
Jan 23, 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
Antimicrobial Stewardship & Sepsis – A Great Debate
Optimal management of sepsis has long-been a holy grail in medicine. One area that remains fraught with debate is how to effectively balance the need for emergent antimicrobial administration with principles of antimicrobial stewardship. A recent Point–Counterpoint series on “Should Broad-Spectrum Antibiotics Be Routinely Administered to All Patients with Sepsis as Soon as Possible”published in […]
Jan 14, 2020
Surveillance for vascular catheter associated complications in home health care is needed
Content written by Dr. Mark Rupp. Impressive gains in the prevention of central line associated bloodstream infections (CLABSI) have been realized in recent years in US hospitals. However, with efforts to improve efficiency and decrease hospital length of stay, patients are increasingly being discharged to home health care to receive intravenous therapy. The rate of […]
Jan 6, 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
Unpacking the new IDSA Community-Acquired Pneumonia guidelines
We are always excited to have our ID fellows provide guest blog posts. Second year ID fellow Dr. Lindsey Rearigh (follow her on Twitter @LRearigh) was recently on her Antimicrobial Stewardship rotation and reviewed the latest published guidelines for Community-Acquired Pneumonia (CAP). The American Thoracic Society (ATS) and Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) recently […]
Dec 10, 2019
Following up on pharmacist-led HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis
Earlier this year we featured a study by UNMC ID Drs. Sara Bares and Susan Swindells: “Midwest pharmacists’ familiarity, experience, and willingness to provide pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV.” We’re excited to share an update on their work building inter-professional relationships to increase PrEP education and use in Nebraska that was recently published in Open Forum […]
Dec 6, 2019
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