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Sarah S. Long, MD, and I are long-time colleagues in the infectious diseases field. We spoke at the recent Infectious Diseases in Children symposium in New York City. Sarah is the founding and current chief editor of the textbook Principles and Practice of Pediatric Infectious Disease and an associate editor of The Journal of Pediatrics, as well as the Red Book Report of the Committee on Infectious Diseases of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Her principal areas of research are vaccine-preventable diseases and management of common infectious diseases in children. She sits on research advisory committees for the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Stanford T. Shulman, MD
Dr. Shulman:
What's different, if anything, for this new generation of infectious disease (ID) specialists than when you or I were first starting out?
Dr. Long:
The remarkable thing is that it hasn't changed that much. It's still detective work, done one patient at a time, beginning with the patient history. That is very old-fashioned in medicine. These days when students bring cases to me, they always start by telling that the patient was seen and had some intervention in the emergency department, but in ID, it's still the chase of the diagnosis, which doesn't start there. We have to be curious; we're interested in the whole patient, from the beginning of the story.
Dr. Shulman:
That's...