This survey provides baseline blood transfusion information for a specific period that can help determine the need for hospital audits and maximum surgical blood-order schedule guideline reviews. This information is relevant to current recommendations to reduce patient's exposure to blood components. These transfusion data will assist in blood program planning based on known disease trends, demographics, and population changes.

Background Vitamin D deficiency is still thought to be widespread in the UK and in recent years the number of cases of rickets reported in children has increased. In this study, the distribution of vitamin D and the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency have been determined for a multi-ethnic population from the inner-city area of Birmingham, UK, where a vitamin D testing service has been readily available for over 10 years.Methods Serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentration was determined using an automated platform (Nichol's Advantage Speciality System) for 830 outpatient samples collected randomly at the end of summer (September).Results In our total study population, prevalence of vitamin D deficiency, defined as a 25-hydroxyvitamin D concentration o10 mg/L, was high (24%): one in eight Caucasians, one in four Black Afro-Caribbeans and one in three Asians were found to be deficient. Levels of deficiency were much higher in Asian women, with almost one in two individuals (43%) found to have a vitamin D level below 10 mg/L. ConclusionOur study has shown that widespread vitamin D deficiency in a UK inner-city population remains an issue. In concordance with other studies, we found a high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in Afro-Caribbean and Asians, and, in particular, women. It is clear that more routine screening of vitamin D is needed.

No abstract

No abstract

The modernists, those innovators of epic ellipses, almost did their successors out of a job. Their formal developments seemed terminal, one-way progressions to be achieved, then discontinued. In the United States the new techniques were taken on with exhilaration, but in Britain existing positions were defended more strongly. Apart from simple imitators, who usually missed the point in any case, those who have actually taken modernism as a genuine beginning have been few and far between.This is understandable. Ezra Pound developed metrical technique and allusion in a dazzling fashion, but overall formal organization and control did not keep pace. Eliot himself shifted from the early concentrations and cinematic cuts to a discursive style of philosophical meditation, and then to the social niceties and equivocations of the verse plays. Modernism appeared as an interlude, bracketed away from the mainstream. So it comes about that Philip Larkin’s poetry enacts a continuous,insistent closure against modernism, and is in that act seen to be fully aware of the experimentation it refuses. Similarly, Jon Silkin sees a wrong direction, and goes back to the work of Isaac Rosenberg to start again. Basil Bunting’s Briggflats is a rare reconciliation of England to modernism. Meanwhile Christopher Middleton, eager to set out from the most exciting starting-points on offer, ends up in the U.S.A. his reputation in Britain absurdly small.