Guest posting: Assoc. Prof. Josh Davis, President, Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases. @Guru_JoshD “ID week” is a large US infectious diseases conference; this year it was in San Francisco, and had over 8,000 delegates. The most talked about trial at this conference (mentioned in at least 5 different sessions) was the Australian-led MERINO trial, an […]
Guest posting: Peter Massey and Julie Kohlhagen, Hunter New England Population Health. Much of the media and health service attention on Acute Rheumatic Fever (ARF) & Rheumatic Heart Disease (RHD) are rightly focused on the top end and desert communities in Australia. In a prospective screening survey of RHD in northern Australia Roberts et al […]
Originally posted on AIMED – Let's talk about antibiotics:
2018 update! Just as relevant. Upside – Ceftriaxone and cefotaxime (third generation cephalosporins-TGC) are amongst the most important agents for directed therapy of infections due to Gram negative organisms that are resistant to ampicillin or cephazolin (a first generation cephalosporin), including Klebsiella pneumoniae . They penetrate the CSF…
Currently (still in Feb 2018) there is a worldwide shortage of piperacillin+tazobactam , an additional issue to the shortage earlier in 2017 . Appropriate substitutions – see – HNELHD advice (November 2017) JHH_Pip_Taz_Fact_Sheet_Oct_2017 . This includes new dosage recommendations for IV amox+clavulanate for intra-abdominal infection (6 -hrly rather than 8- hrly dosing). For further advice, please contact the […]
Guest posting: David Paterson is a Professor of Medicine at The University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research, and Chief Executive Officer of the Wesley Medical Research. He is also a Consultant Infectious Diseases Physician, and Consultant Microbiologist. Reflections on Nobel Prize winner speeches – Bob Dylan to Alexander Fleming [David should require little […]
Guest posting: Dr Nathan Ryder, Clinical Director Sexual Health, Hunter New England Local Health District. Mycoplasma genitalium is an emerging sexually transmitted pathogen. While testing is now widely available in Australia, treatment is becoming increasingly complex. M. genitalium resistance is increasing rapidly and a small but significant proportion of cases are currently untreatable. The benefit of treatment in […]
Guest posting: Dr John Burston, Staff Specialist, Infectious Diseases, Calvary Mater Hospital, Newcastle. Most antibiotic guidelines1-3 , including the HNELHD Community Acquired Pneumonia (CAP) guideline, suggest empirically treating community acquired pneumonia (CAP) with a macrolide or tetracycline to cover ‘atypical’ organisms. But is this necessary and what should be our approach? Beta-lactam monotherapy was non-inferior […]
Guest posting: Assoc. Prof. Josh Davis, Principal Research Fellow/NHMRC Career Development Fellow, Menzies School of Health Research, Senior Staff Specialist Infectious Diseases Physician, John Hunter Hospital, Conjoint Professor School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle The diverse bacterial communities which live in our gastrointestinal tract (primary in the colon), are collectively known as the “gut microbiota” and their collective […]
Guest posting: Dr Jonathan Ash, Infectious Diseases Registrar, John Hunter Hospital, Newcastle, NSW. A recent single centre retrospective case series from Switzerland examined the clinical characteristics, microbiology and treatment of 97 patients with small native joint septic arthritis. The paper highlights significant differences in the pathogenesis of small joint septic arthritis compared to large joints, […]
A recent paper, “Urinary Tract Infection”-Requiem for a Heavyweight by Dr Thomas Finucaine skillfully unpacks many key issues, coupling this with a consideration of the emerging knowledge of the urinary microbiome and virome, suggesting that the term “UTI” might better be referred to as a “urinary dysbiosis”. The paper is worth a detailed read – here […]
AIMED - Let's talk about antibiotics 