Quality improvement in acute stroke: the New York State Stroke Center Designation Project.

Background: Many hospitals lack the infrastructure required to treat patients with acute stroke. The Brain Attack Coalition (BAC) published guidelines for the establishment of primary stroke centers.

Objective: To determine if stroke center designation and selective triage of acute stroke patients improve quality of care.

Validation of birth certificate data in New York State.

Vital statistics birth certificate data are an important source of information for researchers, policy makers, and state officials to evaluate the quality of care delivered to pregnant women. The purpose of this study was to assess the validity of data elements being reported by the hospitals on the birth certificate record when compared to the medical record. This study used a random sample of birth certificates from two upstate and two downstate counties, in New York State, comprising a total of 100 records per county.

[Scabies in a dalysis unit. Mystery and prejudice].

Background: Pruritus is one of the most common symptoms of uremia. The etiology of uremic pruritus is steel incompletely known. Scabies may be a cause of itching in these patients.

Unusual eruption of cutaneous metastases from occult gastric carcinoma shortly after HIV-1 infection.

We report a case of eruptive metastases to the skin of the face and neck from a hitherto unknown gastric carcinoma, occurring in a fifty-two-year-old man (a regular blood donor), about six months after he contracted human immunodeficiency virus-1 infection. The eruption, consisting of more than thirty pea-sized cutaneous nodules appeared within about twenty days. The patient complained of epigastric pain and weight loss.