Birth certificates and a sample of hospital obstetric records for Indochinese refugees in Santa Clara County, CA, 1979CA, -1980, were reviewed. Among 542 live births, the overall median birthweight of 3175 gm and 5.7 per cent rate of low birthweight were favorable; it is our impression that the more recent arrivals, especially Cambodians and Laotians, present at greater risk, lacking prenatal care, and have more infants of low birth rate and more pregnancy complications. (Am J Public Health 1982; 72:742-744.) Since 1975, nearly 400,000 Indochinese refugees have resettled in the United States. Early waves of immigrants were mostly Vietnamese of higher socioeconomic status. New groups include Laotians, Cambodians, and ChineseVietnamese, who have less education and are less accustomed to urban living.' Health assessments have revealed substantial pre-existing nutritional deprivation, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, parasitic infestation, and lack of routine immunizations.2-7The locale of this study, Santa Clara County (SCC), California, a 1300 square mile valley south of San Francisco Bay, has a population of 1,300,000, approximately 30,000 (2.3 per cent) of whom are Indochinese. A monthly influx of over 500 new arrivals has greatly strained existing services, and has seen the establishment of the Indochinese Refugee Assistance Project. We undertook to look at the characteristics of the increasing numbers of births to the Indochinese: 201 in 1979Indochinese: 201 in , 341 in 1980 Methods A listing was prepared indicating the child's name and mother's maiden name for all non-Chinese, non-Japanese Oriental births for 1979-80 in SCC. The ethnicity of each name was checked to ensure that the study population would ResultsThe pre-immigration casualty of this population was evident by findings that 9 per cent of birth documents reported the prior loss of at least one child; of the 610 children previously born to this group, 33 were deceased.The median age of the 542 mothers was 26 years. Teenage pregnancies (< 18 years) accounted for I per cent of the total; mothers age 35 and over accounted for 9 per cent. Parity was not high: 70 per cent were having their first or second child, and only 3 per cent were grand multiparae.Where recorded,** 65 per cent of mothers reported initiating prenatal care in the first trimester, 23 per cent in the second trimester, and 12 per cent in the last trimester or no prenatal care at all.The birth records data revealed a median birthweight of 3175 gm and 5.7 per cent low birthweight (LBW -

Statistics from the first three months of operation of the Santa Clara County Indochinese Health Screening Clinic were analyzed for prevalence of anemia, parasitism, and exposure to tuberculosis in Southeast Asian children and young adults, ages 9 months to 24 years. Anemia was extremely common in infants up to 5 years of age (35.7%) and decreased to 4.8% in the 15-24 year-old category. Parasitism was not-age-dependent, with an average of 58.8% per cent of those screened exhibiting infestation. Positivity in tuberculin skin testing showed a pattern opposite to that of anemia, with a prevalence of 13 per cent in infants and children, rising to 34 per cent in young adults. Over 90 per cent of the target population was successfully screened. Health problems of Indochinese immigrants may be age-related and are very efficiently and effectively identified by an area-wide screening program.