News and Insights

A lot of people have been working on the fentanyl problem for a few years now. There are different strategies that can be taken and different ones work for different people. Here are some of the options that are used most often.

So let’s say you are sold on wanting to stop or even just cut back on your use of opioids. You want to get on medications to help. You don’t think methadone is a good fit for you so you try buprenorphine. And you feel AWFUL. It goes TERRIBLY. WHAT GIVES? And NOW WHAT?!

Celebrating Dr. Phil Lackey’s retirement from Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Dr Brinkley Bellotti was recently intervented by the MIT Technology Review on the topic of H5N1 and its continued spread in dairy cows and poultry. Members of the section on infectious diseases are working on a number of projects to help understand the spread of H5N1 and its impact on animal and human health.

The Wake Forest University School of Medicine Medical Student Infectious Disease Interest Group generated a series of educational materials to help raise awareness about antimicrobial stewardship and resistance for Antimicrobial Awareness Week 2024. Check them out!

Two members of the Section on Infectious Diseases attended the 2024 Epistorm Rt-Estimate Collabathon in Boston hosted by Northeastern University and the Network Science Institute. As part of this project they developed new software to estimate real-time epidemic growth rates–a key epidemiologic parameter that drives infectious disease control and prevention measures.

The Section on Infectious Diseases had a productive summer this year with medical students attending conferences in Australia and participating in the summer Medical Student Research Program.

The Section on Infectious Diseases and Atrium Health Division of Infectious Diseases attended IDWeek 2024 in Los Angeles, CA and was well represented!

Michael DeWitt attended the 2024 International Field Epidemiology and Tropical Medicine course in Peru. This included practical field epidemiology skills, tropical medicine, and public health in Lima and Tumbes, Peru.

‘You are just trading one drug for another’ is a common refrain in the world of substance use disorders. Remember that addiction is not defined by WHAT you use but HOW you use and what the use does to your life and the life of your loved ones.

Patients frequently refuse to take medications that are proven most effective for treating addiction because they fear they are simply ‘trading one drug for another’. Let us now have an overview about how the medications work and how they differ from the drugs people tend to become addicted to.

Patients frequently refuse to take medications that are proven most effective for treating addiction because they fear they are simply ‘trading one drug for another’. Here is why that is not the case.

There are many arguments in academic circles about how to frame and think about addiction. In my personal experience, I find one of the most helpful ways to think of addiction is the classic framework that views addiction as a ‘biopsychosocial’ disease. I like this framework because it helps us identify and then examine all of the key ingredients that go into forming and maintaining a substance use disorder. That then provides us with multiple different paths to treatment.

Serratia marcescens is a gram-negative bacillus that is widespread in the environment and has been recognized as a rare cause of infective endocarditis (IE), particularly in persons who inject drugs (PWID). The literature consists of a 19 person case series in the 1970s followed by just a handful of case reports and small case series. At AHWFB (Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist), we have noticed an increasing number of severe infections, including IE, with Serratia marcescens in PWID. We aimed to gather data on the population that is getting this infection, the clinical characteristics of the infection, and its treatment at our facility.

What does infectious diseases have to do with addiction!? How did you get into this?

In order to inform public health officials and understand the risk of monkeypox in North Carolina, researchers from across Atrium Health and Wake Forest University School of Medicine estimated the number of men who have sex with men by North Carolina county using the NHANES survey data in order to inform vaccination quantities and priorities given the current limited supply of vaccines.

Tracking the reported Monkeypox (MPX) cases in North Carolina and the United States.