Unlabelled: Assessing the frequency of vaccine wastage and the relative magnitude of its various causes may help to target efforts to reduce these losses and to husband funds for increasingly expensive vaccines.
Methods: As a preliminary overview of wastage in the United States, 64 public-sector state and local health department immunization programs were polled in 1998 and 1999 for wastage recording practices. Actual wastage data were collected from a non-random subset of five states.