55. The ID:IOTS annual report 2023

2 years. It’s been a hell of a ride. Here’s to 2 more. 

Links from this episode: 

KASIC 1-page evidence-summary on aminopenicillins for resistant enterococcal UTIs:  https://bit.ly/44CtNnq

AUDIENCE SURVEY!!! 

Please do fill this out, it would mean a lot to us: https://forms.gle/aCq2djmfKPjA6tkMA. 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Soon may the editing come to discontinue. The tasos son. One day, when seer pieced them, we'll take our leave and go.

Speaker 2: 0:10

So here we are at two years of the Idiot's podcast Infectious Disease Insights of two specialists.

Speaker 1: 0:18

So we've been doing this for two years now.

Speaker 2: 0:21

Yeah, surprise, anybody's still listening. They've not been put off by so many things. Surprise, you're not sick of me. Well, I'm contractually obliged to keep talking to you, but I don't know why everybody else is still here, that's true, but I mean still here they are.

Speaker 1: 0:37

and before we go on Callum, I think we should say what we're drinking. Oh, what we're drinking, taliskar Dark Storm for me. Tamnavillian Red Wine, cask Cabernet Sauvignon, oh yeah okay, very fancy, still whiskey, though it's whiskey and it's very nice.

Speaker 1: 0:56

In case any listeners not on the know are a bit confused. I space out Cheers, cheers. A Zoom cheers is never as good as a proper cheers, but yeah, so I thought it'd be. You know the audience might want to know. You know how things are going for the podcast. You know, in general we lasted this a year ago. It is by far our least popular episode.

Speaker 2: 1:22

It's just self-indulged. Simon Hose is a birthday party and nobody turned up.

Speaker 1: 1:26

Well, it's just self-indulged navel gazing. There's no learning whatsoever to be done. But anyway, you know it is what it is. But you know things have gone, you know, in that time, you know, kind of from strength to strength really. And you know where were we a year ago. A year ago we were about, you know, five, six thousand downloads. We just hit 72,000 downloads the other day, so that's a nice achievement. So we're well on our way to 100,000. Our most popular episode is still episode number one, and that's got 2,800 at the moment, followed by sort of episode two, and then there's, you know, a bunch of others that are heading towards more than sort of 2,000 downloads.

Speaker 2: 2:14

Right, so these are all numbers, but each one of these numbers is a unique person sitting in their car cycling their bike running in the fields and their hands running through the hay. Where in the world are these people?

Speaker 1: 2:30

So, callum, I will reply by saying first A a lot of these people will also be on the toilet but B where they are from. So I'm gonna do the breakdown of the last 10 episodes, because our audience initially obviously was quite UK centric and since then it's sort of skewed a little bit more. So about a third of our listeners are from the US, about 30% are then from the UK, and then the sort of remainder from the rest of the world and the sort of like top five countries would be Australia, germany, canada, ireland and South Africa, so like obviously a clear preponderance for the English speaking nations and places where English is spoken quite widely in professional communities like Germany.

Speaker 2: 3:19

Which, yeah, I guess like it's numbers, so it kind of dependent on population as well, because obviously US population is massive compared to most of the other countries.

Speaker 1: 3:29

Yeah, I mean we got a big boost after we we sort of guessed it on Febrile as well, so that gained a sort of exposure to the US ID community and also joining Twitter has led to a lot of sort of people and Twitter's kind of dominated a lot by ID Twitter, at least by UK listeners.

Speaker 2: 3:49

From Twitter at idiots, underscore pod.

Speaker 1: 3:53

Well done. Two years and you finally learned our.

Speaker 2: 3:55

Twitter handle.

Speaker 1: 3:55

I mean, we don't know, just in time for Twitter to die it's anonymous.

Speaker 2: 3:58

It could be either of us tweeting. It is James. It's definitely James. It could be either of us, though it's all James.

Speaker 1: 4:04

The jokes are him. It could be, but I mean very rapidly I sort of assumed mastery of the manhole of the hand. But you have another Twitter handle, so it sort of makes a bit of sense that I can live vicariously through the podcast.

Speaker 2: 4:17

I can claim the best jokes and deny all knowledge of the worst ones.

Speaker 1: 4:21

Yeah, In terms of Twitter, we've got 2,300 followers and we're sort of getting more and more every day. We've not peed Still pretty small fry as far as the Twitter sphere goes but like enough that when we announced the podcast episode, every week we've got another bunch of people clicking to follow us. That's nice.

Speaker 2: 4:41

That's nice, and thank you to everybody that shared the podcast and told a lot of people about it or supported it in some way or came and said hello in person at various events.

Speaker 1: 4:54

Yeah, I mean retweeting the podcast is great, but it only targets people on Twitter. We're very grateful, but word of mouth, I think, is really important. So if you are our only loyal listener in your department, please do try and tell other people about us, like if you find us a useful learning resource, even if you don't find us a useful learning resource. If you could tell people about us anyway because they might find us a useful learning resource, it would question why you're listening if you don't find us to be a useful learning resource.

Speaker 2: 5:24

But you know lots of conversation at the time I have to listen to another episode. I hate it and it's not useful. I just have to keep listening. I don't know what's happening Obsessive, compulsive downloader or something like that You're never going to finish all podcasts, as far too many.

Speaker 1: 5:41

Well, but the important thing, Callum, is how do you feel about how the podcast is going? Me, yeah, do you satisfy these numbers? Or do you feel that I, as your deputy sub assistant, co-host, or whatever title you gave me all those years ago, have not been pulling my weight?

Speaker 2: 5:57

I'm very satisfied and I think actually the thing that has been the most joyful for me and the whole thing was going to Ekmid this year and the number of people that just came over and either I think probably Rick is you know face like. Nobody knows what we look like, we're obviously master of disguise, nobody knows where we work, etc. People came over and were like are you calm from? Or people would come over and say you're an idiot and I just, you know, wouldn't quite get it for a second.

Speaker 1: 6:29

And just to be clear, Callum, this is dissimilar to other conferences you've been to in the past.

Speaker 2: 6:35

It's daily life out on the street. The bus stop, you know and I just have to check. So it was just really nice to meet some loyal listeners in person. But how did they know it was you? They know who you are. I had a lanyard on if I name on it, so that probably helped.

Speaker 1: 6:50

Callum much is mean is fairly weird. I mean, jay McCrae is not, you know, unweird. I'm not. I'm not saying my name is unweird.

Speaker 2: 7:00

Anyway, it was really nice to meet some loyal listeners in person and and just because we kind of speak into the void or the screens rather, and there is a set number of people that appear on a screen to say they've listened. But it's not a conversation, it's not a two way street. You don't get any feedback often, other than on reviews, if you, if you put one on, then you know it sometimes is difficult to know if what we're doing is helpful or impactful, or you know, like, how people are reacting to it. So it's really I think it really helps motivate us to keep doing it, although I would say that it's not. I, actually, if I think back two years ago, I wasn't really sure like what the longevity of the podcast would be, how successful it would be or like how we would motivate to continue, and I have to say it's not been hard.

Speaker 1: 7:53

No, I mean, I sort of look forward to our little talks where we speak into the void, as you said. You know I find it useful as a you know, because my role my main role I suppose in creating the podcast is that I'm doing the prep, and when I'm doing the prep I'm usually just about every episode these days learning something new about a bug which I kind of thought I had licked, you know. So the most recent episode don't like bugs, okay, but you know like, for an example, we've got an upcoming episode that will be released after this one drops, which is on pseudomonas. And I knew you know a little bit about pseudomonas, resistance mechanisms and but I didn't know as much as I now know, having prepped for that episode and there's just kind of like a little bit of just thinking how much you talk about that and how little of I have retained.

Speaker 2: 8:55

If you ask me now about pseudomonas resistance, like I'm not sure I need to go back and listen to that. When it drops I guess I will listen to it again.

Speaker 1: 9:03

But you know how, like part of the you know, being a senior infectious disease doc, like you know, be a senior reg. Like you, are a consultant. Like me, the job is not to know everything. The job is nowhere to look. Yeah, you know for stuff and you now know, like, say you, you know are asked about pseudomonas resistance mechanism to you know, maybe text me or or, like you know, go look at the prep notes or go look at the papers that we put at the end of the, at the end of the prep notes.

Speaker 2: 9:34

Yeah, I think that's something that reflecting two years ago to now. So I was, I was dealing with a listeria Baterenia today and I went back and I was, I was thinking about it and I was I was thinking about, and I think we talked about this in the podcast episode, laying into listeria Lattropacillus and Lofrix, and we were talking about gentamicin synergy for meningitis and the monolidit trial. I can't remember if we talked about that. My go to resource now is that I often think, oh, we talked about this in the podcast and I can't quite remember it. So I guess maybe the message there is don't worry if you listen to the podcast and you feel like you don't remember everything from it, because I'm in that podcast and I don't remember everything about it. And sometimes at work people are like, oh, blah, blah, blah and I'm like, oh, that's really interesting, so that you talked about that in the podcast. Oh my God.

Speaker 1: 10:24

But I mean, not even I remember everything that's in every episode, like the and I wrote the prep for it and you know the. You know the. The job is not really to to memorize everything. It's the job is, no vaguely, that there might be something to discuss and prepare. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 10:42

The prep notes now going on to the Notion site, and I found them really useful as a resource to go back to and review and link from.

Speaker 1: 10:49

I guess that's something that we could announce in this episode. So, yeah, I've, and just recently I've migrated all the prep notes from. We had a one drive and it worked okay, but sometimes people couldn't access it, and actually Sarah Dung from the February podcast suggested using Notion. She uses Notion for her for graphics, and so then I sort of I started forgetting to use it. I'm very early on with my familiarity with it, but the good thing is that you can publish pages, and so I've moved all the print notes over to Notion. So the earlier ones are still Word documents and there's a couple of them that I've transcribed into proper Notion pages, and the later ones are all going to be Notion pages. So I'm going to build them all in Notion with appropriate links, and so hopefully this should be more usable as a sort of learning resource moving forward.

Speaker 2: 11:45

Yeah, yeah, I've got that favorited and I'm finding it very helpful, so thank you. If nobody else is using it, that's fine. It's helpful enough for me, James.

Speaker 1: 11:52

So you know each episode is getting, on average, more than 1000 listens. How many of them would actually click through to the? You know the prep notes like probably a handful, but it's there if you need it and if I'm going to be doing the prep for the episodes, I might as well just put it online. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 12:27

Well, we talked about the past and the present we're enjoying a dram and the future? What does the future hold?

Speaker 1: 12:34

We've got, you know, outlines of the kind of episodes that we that we want to cover over the next couple of years.

Speaker 2: 12:41

There's a definite plan behind the scenes. That's why we definitely what did we do in the wrong order? We did. We did part two of the exams and then we did part one and we went back to part two.

Speaker 1: 12:52

Yeah, but that was just sort of like opportunistic really. That wasn't really a, you know, desire to screw with everyone.

Speaker 2: 13:01

There's a plan behind the scenes we were working our way through. I think we talked about this in Happy Birthday, episode one.

Speaker 1: 13:08

Yeah, we haven't got that much further on since then actually because we've done a lot of non-bug episodes. But the plan is to run. We've run through the sort of major gram positives and a few of the minor ones. So now we're running through the gram negatives, we've sort of made our way through the intrabaturalis and we are sort of moving on to the non-fermenters next and then we're kind of go to parvo bacteria, kind of coca-bacilli, coma-shaped or spiral organisms like vibrio, campylobactors, helicobactors and then your spirochetes. So you know, lyme will be in there, siflis will be in there, etc. Etc. Yeah, excited, all of these, like moving through all of this.

Speaker 1: 13:52

If we did unepisodes a fortnight, which is what our current output is from now into the end, and did nothing but bug episodes, that would take us one year. So we've got 25 topics starting from now. We've got pseudomonas to release, so that's 26. But you know, part of the reason we've started deviating from just doing the bugs is that it can be a little bit boring. And so we're, you know, doing drug episodes. We've got our idiots guides to. You know, the beta-lactam's are all there. We've got all the other major antibiotic classes that we could go into because we're doing gram negatives. I'd probably want to do ones that cover gram negatives, and we've already done beta-lactam's and amygl like side, so that would be things like quinolones and cotomox. Is all colostin, that kind of you know that kind of stuff, the big hitters and then intersperse with them sort of syndrome episodes. So we've got a few episodes now in urinary tract infection and their unrelated pathologies. Love to do one on recurrent UCIs. Might do one in prostatitis as well.

Speaker 1: 15:00

Oh, that's actually that'd be really useful Because I feel like I get that asked question a lot about like penetrance into the prostate and Well, me too, because the prostate is a protected site, sort of like antibiotic penetrance is not the same, as you know, the kidney, where antibiotic penetrance basically equilibrates to, equilibrates to plasma, or the urine, where we've talked about a lot of antibiotics concentrated.

Speaker 2: 15:24

The prostate is kind of different again A whole moxicillin for intra-coca UTI. I like that 's been practice changing for me.

Speaker 1: 15:32

I can't stop thinking about it. I forget what they're called for, but we can include a link to there. I sent the note to you. Actually, Callum. They've got some more references about this, about how you can use a moxicillin to treat intra-cocal infections, just because the mox level trumps the.

Speaker 2: 15:52

Yeah, I think I was texting you about it at the weekend because I was on call and it came up in discussion and it's one of those things where I'm like, oh, blah, blah, blah and podcast blah, blah, blah, you know this great idea. And everyone's like, okay, well, you know, I got up a thing and I'm like I can't quite remember what James text I have to go back. So having the prep notes is really useful.

Speaker 1: 16:15

Is that why you texted me? Yeah, okay, okay, thank you Talking about it at work. So yeah, I suppose the other thing that we've not really explored a lot is sort of exploration of the microbiology test side of things you know like. So you know we had an episode on the Maldi. I love it and I kind of, you know, wanted to, maybe, you know, talk about Aegars and talk about, you know, antibiotic disc sensitivity testing and all that sort of stuff.

Speaker 1: 16:44

I've kind of we've kind of shied away for a bit, not least because the let's Talk Micro podcast with Louie Plaza is doing it so much better than we could and because he's a biomedical scientist, he's better at it, because he does it all the time and we are, you know, like, certainly it's not my field of expertise. You might know a little bit more about it than you might know a little bit more than me. That come, but I bet you don't know more about it than Lewis. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, so it's kind of his thing. So I think you know if people are looking for that and you know complex discussion of agars. So certainly the first few episodes will let Stone Micro definitely in place to go.

Speaker 1: 17:35

I suppose the only other thing to say is that you might not want this future and you might want us to do something else, in which case we invite you now to tell us what you want, because, for the first time ever, we are going to conduct an audience survey. So in the description of this podcast episode it was going to be a link to Google form. If you would like to let us know a little bit about yourselves and let us know who you know you are, where you are and what you would like us to be doing next, a short survey is available for your perusal. It's not going to store any personal data. It's not going to store your email. We've made sure of that. It's completely anonymized. Please do let us know what you would like us to discuss, what you're liking about the podcast, what you don't like about it. Please do let us know your thoughts.

Speaker 2: 18:26

That would be really valuable to us to improve.

Speaker 1: 18:29

Well, I mean, we only want to improve, we don't want to deprove or Regress. Whatever. The opposite is regress. Yeah, we're going to escalate the podcast. But yeah, like, if you want to tell us something that we're doing right, that's great, doing wrong, that's also great. Yeah, please do Full out the show. I'll put it on Twitter as well, and I suppose the last thing to say is that if you want to come and yell at us in person, there's an opportunity to do so. Is that not right, callan?

Speaker 2: 18:58

Yeah, please don't yell at us. Yeah, we're applying to both be attending the Federation of Infection Society's conference at Edinburgh, which is taking place in November.

Speaker 1: 19:13

We'll include a link to this in the show notes too, so that if you're in the UK or near the UK and you want to come, then you can sign up. It's sort of the a fusion conference that's hosted an alternate years by the Microbiology Society, the British Infection Association, the British Society of Round-to-Microbial Chemotherapy and the Healthcare Infection Society, which are the four great infection societies that we have in the UK. Why do we have four? I'm not sure it's a tetrad, but I do know the tetrad, yes, the tetrad, but I do know that the host fists on sort of a four year cycle. This year is the Microbiology Society's turn and it is in Edinburgh and it is 14 to the 15th of November.

Speaker 1: 20:04

Okay, the Edinburgh exhibition, the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, I think it is in Haymarket. It's nice and central. So, yeah, if you want to there's a free crash. Oh, there's free crash, that's good. So if you want to come and talk to us, you may do so there. It'd be lovely to see you.

Speaker 2: 20:23

Yes, I think that's everything that we had to say at the two year mark, and all I can say is thanks for listening, and also thanks to James, because he is a lovely co-host.

Speaker 1: 20:35

Oh, but note as lovely as you Callum is-.

Speaker 2: 20:39

God, I felt so insincere.

Speaker 1: 20:46

I know, I don't know man, Like it's been nice doing this with you. You know what I mean. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 20:50

Well, here's to-.

Speaker 1: 20:52

I'm so emotional as two British men can get, so you can take it or leave it. Listeners, Bye-bye.

Speaker 2: 20:56

Here's to another two years, cheers, cheers.

Speaker 1: 21:00

Now that the episode's done, we hope you learned and had lots of fun. So go forth and treat people with some of what you now know, for he's a jolly good podcast. For he's a jolly good podcast. For he's a jolly good podcast, and so say both of us, and so say both of us, and so say both of us, for he's a jolly good podcast for-. How long is this? No, we're going to cut that part.

Speaker 2: 21:29

I mean, that's great, your dulcet tones sing true.