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David W. Kimberlin, MD, FAAP, is Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. He's also the current editor of the AAP's Red Book . David has been very involved in research much of his career, overseeing the pediatric studies conducted by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' Collaborative Antiviral Study Group (CASG). The CASG is an NIH-sponsored, multicenter, international organization that conducts antiviral therapeutic trials into "orphan" diseases that the pharmaceutical companies don't tend to look into.
Stanford T. Shulman, MD
Dr. Shulman:
You're the current editor of the AAP's Red Book . How's that going?
Dr. Kimberlin:
It has been a great experience so far. One thing about infectious disease is you never really know what the next emerging infection is going to be. For instance, from the late 1990s through the early 2000s, we saw West Nile virus march across the country summer after summer, and then it kind of seemed to burn itself out. We didn't have a lot of West Nile activity for several years and then all of a sudden last summer it came roaring back with deaths in Texas and the mid-section of the country. You never really know. It's hard to predict. A real strength of the Red...