Recommendations for Preoperative Management of Frailty from the Society for Perioperative Assessment and Quality Improvement (SPAQI).

Frailty is an age-related, multi-dimensional state of decreased physiologic reserve that results in diminished resiliency and increased vulnerability to stressors. It has proven to be an excellent predictor of unfavorable health outcomes in the older surgical population. There is agreement in recommending that a frailty evaluation should be part of the preoperative assessment in the elderly.

Neonatal jaundice in Asian, white, and mixed-race infants.

Background: East Asians have inherently higher bilirubin levels at birth than whites. The potential for unnecessary treatment makes jaundice a problem of public health and clinical significance.

Objectives: To report the occurrence of jaundice diagnoses in East Asian and mixed East Asian/white infants in Washington State in recent years, and to compare the risk of diagnosis with neonatal jaundice among these infants, relative to white infants.

Frequency and causes of vaccine wastage.

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.