The Infectious Disease Physician's Holiday Wish List

For all you last-minute shoppers, Payal K. Patel MD, MPH, and Sujit Suchindran MD, have put together a wish list of the top items to get the infectious disease (ID) physician in your life. We give you:

The Infectious Disease Physician’s Holiday Wish List

1. Star Wars Episode XI — The Last Antibiotic

Ok fine, no one except us wants to see a Star Wars movie starring ID physicians. But can you imagine? Alexander Fleming is Yoda, warning us all that penicillin may not last that long.

2. Ugly (but Chic) Micro Holiday Sweater

Jealous of the Derm Consult team walking by in their head-to-toe Valentino gear? You’ll be the hit of the hospital holiday potluck when people try to figure out if the center of your sweater is spirochetes or wait is it a polyhedral virus? There's no conversation starter like syphilis!

3. Dickensian Funding Mechanisms

They say Charles Dickens was paid per word for his great works of literature and he wrote A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist. If you start paying ID physicians per word, they’ll finally be able to pay back their school loans, buy a new car, and get gold-plated pocket hand sanitizers for everyone in the family (all with only a week’s worth of consults).

4. Oral Bactericidal Antipseudomonal Nonquinolone Antibiotic

That feeling of dread when you hear from your transplant colleagues will melt away when you have this in your back pocket. Plus: this option will come without QTc prolongation, significant risk of Clostridium difficile, tendinopathy or an FDA black box warning.

5. HIV Cure

Nothing would make an ID doctor’s Christmas morning more special than being able to tell patients that this virus can be cured. Enough with the latent reservoirs already, just cure the darn thing!

6. A Mandatory Tattoo of ID Pearls for Medical Students / Housestaff

They’ll never forget that bilateral cellulitis just isn’t a thing, VRE in the urine is probably colonization, and vancomycin/Zosyn isn’t the answer to all of life’s problems.

7. Personal Protective Equipment Snuggie

Now, you’ll never want to take off your C diff gown—except you will definitely want to take that off.

8. Antibiotic-Free Chalupas

About 80% of all antibiotics used in the United States aren’t taken by humans, they’re given to the cows, pigs, and chickens that make up the filling at your next Taco Bell order. Increasing government oversight of how antibiotics are used in agriculture along with antibiotic stewardship is our last frontier in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.

9. A Magic Star Trek Machine That Teleports All Outside Hospital Records Within Minutes of the ID consult

You will now be able to review, in real-time, all the outside microbiology, antibiotic durations, and surgery notes from your patient’s multiple hospitalizations across the state on his last RV tour of Great Butter Sculptures of the Midwest. Some may call this magic machine a national health record, or VA CPRS.

10. A Lifelong Flu Vaccine

Instead of hearing patients (and our colleagues) complain every year about how flu vaccination doesn't work (and how the dead vaccine gave them the flu), how about having to hear it only once? This could prevent thousands of deaths in the young and old and reduce a significant burden on our society (flu cost the US economy $10.4 billion just last year).