{"id":5913,"date":"2015-03-21T14:20:32","date_gmt":"2015-03-21T18:20:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/?p=5913"},"modified":"2021-12-21T17:45:23","modified_gmt":"2021-12-21T22:45:23","slug":"id-learning-unit-coagulase-negative-staph-and-the-anti-zebra-residents-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/id-learning-unit-coagulase-negative-staph-and-the-anti-zebra-residents-report\/2015\/03\/21\/","title":{"rendered":"ID Learning Unit: Coagulase-Negative Staph, and the “Anti-Zebra” Residents’ Report"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"CoNS<\/a>At the risk of betraying a deep streak of nerdiness, I confess to being a huge fan of\u00a0Residents’ Report. This infatuation goes back to my medical student days, when the occasional chance to watch the Chief Medical Resident — who seemed the smartest doctor on the planet — lead a discussion of\u00a0an interesting case inspired all kinds of\u00a0aspirations.<\/p>\n

Alas, I was never chosen to be Chief Resident, but have been lucky enough to sit in on my fair share of Residents’ Reports over the years, including one this past week.\u00a0And so glad I did, as current Chief Resident Mary Montgomery<\/a>\u00a0tried a new twist on the genre: Instead of presenting a fascinating rare case — a “zebra”<\/a> — or a challenging ongoing diagnostic dilemma, she\u00a0chose a couple of extremely non-zebroid (that’s a word) cases that involved coagulase-negative staph (CoNS), a bug\u00a0that frankly most of us think is pretty ho-hum.<\/p>\n

But you know what? It was a great report,\u00a0educational and entertaining, and here’s what we learned\u00a0about this commonly encountered (but frequently challenging) entity:<\/p>\n