ESCMID Global, ESCMID’s flagship congress, kicks off this Friday in Vienna. In light of that, Angela Huttner and Thomas Tängdén sit down with ESCMID leadership, President Robert Skov and Immediate-Past President Annelies Zinkernagel in this episode of Communicable . Together they discuss the roles of medical societies like ESCMID in shaping healthcare policy, the importance of scientific communication, and lessons learned from the COVID pandemic. The conversation highlights ESCMID’s priorities f...
Apr 06, 2025•48 min•Season 2Ep. 24
Communicable returns to the topic of gender dynamics in medicine in the second half of this special. This round, Angela Huttner wants to hear from the men, CMI Comms editors Marc Bonten, Josh Davis, Navaneeth Narayanan and Thomas Tängdén, about tackling issues like the evolving expectations at home and work, the impact of parental-leave policies, and the systemic biases that continue to shape careers. Personal anecdotes and reflections highlight both the progress made and the hurdles that still ...
Mar 23, 2025•31 min•Season 2Ep. 23
In honour of International Women's Day, Communicable releases the first of a two-part special on gender dynamics within the fields of infectious diseases and clinical microbiology. Moderated by Angela Huttner, part 1 focuses on the women's perspectives, featuring CMI Comms editors Erin McCreary, Annie Joseph, and Huttner herself, who together reflect on personal experiences of gender bias in the workplace. They discuss differential (mis)treatment, break down common gendered situations in the wor...
Mar 07, 2025•40 min•Season 2Ep. 22
Several publications have described wondrous therapeutic effects of faecal microbiota transplant (FMT) on Clostridioides difficile infection. Yet the recent randomised trial assessing FMT in US veterans was terminated early for futility. In this episode, hosts Angela Huttner and Marc Bonten delve into the history, application, and complexities of FMT with experts Maria Vehreschild (Frankfurt University Hospital, Germany) and Dimitri Drekonja (Minneapolis Veteran Affairs Care System and Universit...
Feb 23, 2025•57 min•Season 2Ep. 21
Despite being preventable and curable, tuberculosis remains a major global health threat, infecting over 10 million people and claiming more than 1 million lives every year. In this episode of Communicable , hosts Angela Huttner and Navaneeth Narayanan discuss tuberculosis with experts Lorenzo Guglielmetti of Doctors without Borders and Olha Konstantynovska of Kharkiv National University, Ukraine. Key topics include the history, transmission, and pathophysiology of tuberculosis, as well as curre...
Feb 09, 2025•54 min•Season 2Ep. 20
Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) affect millions globally daily, and multidrug-resistant strains are complicating treatment. Hosts Angela Huttner and Josh Davis welcome experts Dr. Teodora Elvira Wi from WHO and Professor Catriona Bradshaw from Monash University to discuss critical issues surrounding ‘super gonorrhoea,’ chlamydia, syphilis, Mycoplasma genitalium , and bacterial vaginosis. The episode reviews the latest epidemiology and highlights the need to innovate diagnostics and treatm...
Jan 26, 2025•58 min•Season 2Ep. 19
Rising anti-vaccine sentiment and dissemination of misinformation are threats to public health. In the US, calls to revoke certain public health mandates have been proposed by likely members of the incoming administration, among them vaccination against polio. The fourth instalment of the Nightmare Series is both a cautionary tale and an effort to preserve and share clinical expertise on how to diagnose and manage polio and rubella in a world where, until now, few doctors have had to face these ...
Jan 12, 2025•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 18
The last episode of the year carries a special end-of-year message from the CMI Comms editors and replays the very first episode of Communicable aired on 10 May 2024, in which editors Angela Huttner, Marc Bonten, and Erin McCreary discuss late-breaker clinical trials presented at ESCMID Global 2024 in Barcelona, providing insights into the trials’ designs, results, and implications. The DOTS trial compared two doses of long-acting dalbavancin to standard of care in patients with complicated S. a...
Dec 29, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 17
The topic of climate change can engender a ‘doom and gloom’ narrative, as many climate and health consequences are already manifesting. Our host, Dr. Navaneeth Narayanan is joined by two ID physicians passionate about climate change and sustainable clinical practice, Dr. Shreya Doshi (Washington DC, US) and Dr. Laura Jung (Leipzig, Germany). Together they discuss new trends in infectious diseases observed in clinical practice as a direct consequence of climate change, including how tropical dise...
Dec 15, 2024•51 min•Season 1Ep. 16
Wastewater surveillance is a powerful epidemiological tool that “mirrors our life,” and has gained wide attention in recent years due to its application during the COVID-19 pandemic. The hosts this week, Drs. Navaneeth Narayanan and Emily McDonald, are joined by two wastewater surveillance experts, Dr. Nasreen Hassoun-Kheir of Geneva University Hospitals, a WHO Collaborating Centre on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), as well as Professor David Graham of Newcastle University, United Kingdom, to di...
Dec 01, 2024•55 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Substandard and falsified (SF) antimicrobials are a neglected global health problem and have been implicated as drivers of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Substandard medicines are authorized medical products that fail to meet either their quality standards or their specifications, whereas falsified medicines are those that deliberately and fraudulently misrepresent their identity, composition or source. Host Angela Huttner is joined by Pernette Bourdillon Esteve, Technical Officer for the World...
Nov 18, 2024•52 min•Season 1Ep. 14
The market of predatory publishing is as lucrative as it is unethical. Predatory journals are disguised as legitimate entities, and prey on both early-career academics and the naïve. In this episode of Communicable , hosts Angela Huttner and Marc Bonten are joined by Editors-in-chief Ursula Hofer ( Lancet Infect Dis ) and Leonard Leibovici ( CMI ) to discuss the various schemes of the ‘Wild West’ of publishing, and how to avoid them. This episode was edited by Kathryn Hostettler and peer-reviewe...
Nov 04, 2024•46 min•Season 1Ep. 13
Enterococci are commensal microbes, part of the healthy microflora populating the human gut. But they are also opportunistic pathogens and notorious nosocomial agents with intrinsic traits that promote their pathogenesis and make them difficult to kill. In the third instalment of the Nightmare Series, hosts Angela Huttner and Thomas Tängdén are joined by enterococcal experts Kimberly Kline (University of Geneva) and Louis Rice (Brown University) to discuss what make vancomycin-resistant enteroco...
Oct 21, 2024•57 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Carbapenemase producers are a nightmare for clinicians. Not only are they resistant to carbapenems, a last resort β-lactam antibiotic, they are notorious for developing multidrug and pandrug resistances resulting in limited to no treatment options. In this episode of Communicable , hosts Angela Huttner and Thomas Tängdén sit down with Dr. David Paterson (National University of Singapore) and Dr. Souha Kanj (American University of Beirut Medical Center, Lebanon), two ID physicians from regions wh...
Oct 07, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 11
On the verge of a post-antibiotic reality, there is an urgent clinical need for new antibiotics. Luckily, new candidates are in the pipeline and older agents are getting a second breath of life through combination therapy. In this episode of Communicable , host Erin McCreary invites Dr. Markus Zeitlinger of the University of Vienna (Austria) and scientific expert for the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and Dr. Michael Dudley, president and CEO of Qpex Biopharma, to discuss antimicrobials in the ...
Sep 23, 2024•53 min•Season 1Ep. 10
The current H5N1 avian flu outbreak in poultry and dairy cows in the US has raised the alarm on bird flu and its transmission risk across species. At present, the virus has infected 100 million birds across 48 states and 196 dairy herds across 14 states. Luckily, the H5N1 avian flu, which is very lethal in birds, does not transmit easily into humans nor does it generally cause severe and systemic symptoms when humans are infected. Still, workers most exposed to these infected animals are testing...
Sep 09, 2024•50 min•Season 1Ep. 9
Only known to us since 2008, Candida auris is an emerging fungal pathogen spreading quickly around the world; alarmingly, it is most commonly found in healthcare settings. C. auris sets itself apart from other Candida species with its unique tolerance to high saline and temperature environments and propensity to develop antifungal resistances that promote its survival in hospitals and healthcare facilities. Hosts Emily McDonald and Navaneeth Narayanan are joined by fungal experts Dr. Jeffrey Ryb...
Aug 26, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Once considered endemic only to tropical and subtropical climates such as Southeast Asia and northern Australia, melioidosis is expanding to non-endemic areas such as the southern US. Climate change is impacting infectious diseases, melioidosis being no exception. Now is the time to inform and prepare: as this Communicable episode’s title indicates, melioidosis is going global. Join hosts Angela Huttner and Josh Davis on their in-depth exploration of melioidosis with invited experts Dr. Ella Meu...
Aug 12, 2024•52 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Responsible for 1.3 million deaths and 2.2 million new infections per year, viral hepatitis is the second leading cause of morbidity and mortality amongst all infectious diseases, just behind tuberculosis. Hosts Angela Huttner and Oana Sandulescu welcome special guest and leading hepatitis expert, Professor Mojca Matičič, MD, PhD (Ljubljana, Slovenia), to refresh your knowledge on the pathogenesis of hepatitis B & C infections, review the latest direct-acting antiviral (DAA) therapies, map o...
Jul 25, 2024•54 min•Season 1Ep. 6
The ‘I’ (intermediate susceptibility) in a EUCAST-guided antibiogram never meant impending resistance to your antibiotic. It was never meant to make you find the one ‘S’ (invariably a carbapenem) and use it instead—even if many clinicians did. In this episode of Communicable, hosts Marc Bonten and Angela Huttner welcome Profs. Christian Giske (outgoing chair) and Sören Gatermann (newly elected chair) of the European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (EUCAST) to discuss its recent...
Jul 15, 2024•39 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Hosts Angela Huttner & Erin McCreary welcome Prof. David Paterson (Singapore) and Prof. Josh Davis (Newcastle, Australia) to discuss the design and results of the BLING-3 trial, which compared continuous infusion of beta-lactam antibiotics to standard intermittent dosing in 7000 critically ill patients across 104 intensive-care units. In unadjusted analyses, the trial did not show a statistically significant mortality benefit with continuous infusion. Yet in prespecified adjusted analyses, t...
Jul 01, 2024•45 min•Season 1Ep. 4
What are WHO's most wanted bacterial pathogens in 2024? Hosts Angela Huttner & Oana Sandulescu welcome guests Dr. Hatim Sati of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Dr. Erin Duffy (CARB-X) to discuss WHO’s new Priority Pathogens List. Developed by WHO and a panel of global experts, the List identifies the ‘top’ bacteria for which research & development are of critical, high, and medium priority, and thus serves as a framework for resource allocation and public-policy guidance. Episode...
Jun 17, 2024•43 min•Season 1Ep. 3
In this episode, hosts Josh Davis (Newcastle, Australia) and Angela Huttner (Geneva, Switzerland) interview the phage ‘microbiologist-clinician duo’, Drs. Shawna McCallin and Lorenz Leitner (Balgrist Hospital, Zurich, Switzerland). They explore the history of phages, the process of bringing phage therapy to a patient, potential resistance to phages, availability of individualized therapy versus phage cocktails, and the place of phage therapy in the future. Drs. Leitner and McCallin reflect on th...
Jun 03, 2024•54 min•Season 1Ep. 2
CMI Communications editors Angela Huttner, Marc Bonten, and Erin McCreary discuss late-breaker clinical trials presented at ESCMID Global (ECCMID) in Barcelona, providing insights into the trials’ designs, results, and implications. The DOTS trial compared two doses of long-acting dalbavancin to standard of care in patients with complicated S. aureus bacteremia. GAME-CHANGER compared cefiderocol to standard of care for gram-negative infections. PediCAP compared oral step-down therapy with amoxic...
May 10, 2024•58 min•Season 1Ep. 1
