Background: Researchers across the globe have continued their effort in identifying important risk factors for severe COVID-19 infection. Patient demographics including age, race, gender, and certain chronic medical conditions including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, and heart failure have been identified as the important risk factors for severity. To simply the risk stratification process, the CHA2DS2-VASc [...]

Background: Febrile infants under 60 days-old undergo extensive evaluation for infection. Recent AAP guidelines recommend evaluation of the procalcitonin (PCT) level in the work-up of febrile infants 8-60 days-old to aid in predicting bacterial infection (BI) due to its high specificity; however, the sensitivity of PCT is relatively low. Recent literature has identified the Procalcitonin-To-Albumin [...]

Background: Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI) is the most common health care–associated infection in the United States and has serious clinical consequences with limited data on economic impact on US hospitals. The objective of this study was to quantify the cost of hospitalizations, readmissions, and expected reimbursement for each all-cause and CDI-related hospitalization during 12 months [...]

Case Presentation: A 43-year-old male with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), off antiretroviral therapy (ART) for 5 years presented to an outside hospital in July 2022 with diffuse umbilicated skin lesions. Skin scrapings for the monkeypox virus PCR were positive. No medications were prescribed. Days later, the patient was admitted to a different hospital with worsening [...]

Case Presentation: A 56-year-old female with a prior history of acute myeloid leukemia, status-post allogenic stem cell transplant in 2016 (in remission), complicated by chronic graft versus host disease (on mycophenolate), and pulmonary coccidioidomycosis in 2000 presented due to hemoptysis. She experienced 7 days of blood-tinged sputum with upper respiratory symptoms preceding that. Five weeks [...]

Case Presentation: A 54 year-old man with a history of opioid use disorder, housing insecurity and hypoplastic myelodysplastic syndrome presented with one month of shortness of breath, productive cough, fever, and chills. He also endorsed a twenty pound weight loss over the course of three months. He had presented to an outside hospital three weeks [...]

Case Presentation: Patient is a 41-year-old male with no relevant medical history who presented with 3 days of right orbital swelling. Accompanying symptoms included fevers, chills, and tinnitus. There was erythema above the right vermillion border with extension to the nasal cavity and right orbit. Sensation to light touch was decreased over the V2 nerve [...]

Case Presentation: A 55-year-old woman with a history of rheumatoid arthritis presented for generalized weakness, dysuria, nausea, and dizziness of 1 week duration. She developed progressive weakness with associated decreased exercise tolerance, nausea, and diarrhea. Her oral intake decreased. There was no inciting event and did not note any recent close contacts with similar symptoms.Her [...]

Case Presentation: A 77-year-old Russian-speaking woman recently recovered from severe COVID-19 infection presented for incision and drainage of a right thumb abscess complicated by synovitis and osteomyelitis. Four months prior, she injured her right thumb after twisting a jar lid. X-rays showed soft tissue swelling with cystic changes and crystals in the scaphoid and radial [...]

Case Presentation: A 36-year-old male with history of keratoconus, corneal scars following corneal transplant, asthma, eczema, chronic herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) and varicella zoster virus (VZV), presented with concerns of eye involvement secondary to HSV-1 versus VZV reactivation. Physical examination revealed periorbital edema, vesicular lesions in trigeminal nerve ophthalmic distribution, neck and upper extremities. [...]