HTLV

Hey! It's been a long hiatus since I've been able to write in here, and I can tell you what happened in the mean time. I tried to take notes during the last entry during my noon lecture as we were talking about interesting cases when my battery died. Then I had my CPC last Wednesday so for the week prior to that I completely nerded out. Much like a college student who had finals to take before Christmas break, I spent all my free time on my presentation and I think it went well. The final diagnosis was Evans syndrome + IVIG-induced osmotic nephrosis and I learned so much while I was working on the case. It was really amazing.
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But anyways, back to my reading. So I did a little reading in Harrison's today on HTLV. I meant to start reading the HIV chapter because I am going to be working in the HIV clinic next week, but the Retrovirus introduction was the 5 pages before that. Oh, and not mention the HIV "chapter" is like 70 pages long. And there is also the fact that I have a clinic patient that is HTLV positive.

So here's what I learned. HTLV can be acquired perinatlly, from sex, or from blood. If a pt just has the virus, they should take precautions to practice safe sex and not breasfeed their kids. It's associated with T-cell lymphomas (hence the name) as well as a myelopathy that can resemble multiple sclerosis called HAM. Women are more likely to get HAM and they are also more likely to pick up HTLV from sex. There is an association between HIV and HTLV but this is usually seen in injection drug users.
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After this I started reading about HIV and so far I'm reading about how the virus infects cells.
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In other news, still no word on any interviews. I'm not sure where I am going with the whole fellowship thing and where I want to be next year, so maybe it's not even the right time to apply. But one of my co-workers did get an interview for ID so it looks like the season is starting...