PENSA Newsletter May-August 2008, Vol.9 No.2 Message From Editor Dear PENSA members: Firstly, we would like to express our sincere sympathy and regrets to our friends in Myanmar and China about the disasters during the past few months. We hope that they will recover soon. However, we can learn a lot and should be alert about nutrition planning in case of emergency or disaster. Apart from the news about natural disaster, there are also some problems associated with food occurred in many of our member countries such as the inadequacy of rice production with increasing price in Philippines, Vietnam, the protest about US’s beef in Korea and the political issues about food price in Thailand. All of these problems raise the public concern about food access by the poor people and may cause changes in nutritional status in many countries. Close surveillance is recommended for early detection and correction of the problems. In this newsletter, we have 5 articles from the past PENSA meetings. “The reality of nutrition status in transplantation patients” by Professor Myung Duk Lee from Korea, “The correlation of the Mini-Nutritional Assessment and the Tinetti Gait Balance Score among patients admitted at the Geriatric Center (St. Luke’s Medical Center)” by Rosary M. Amane from Philippines, “Nutrition screening tools and the prediction of postoperative infectious and wound complications” by Punwadee Putawatana from Thailand, “A proposal of society character of PENSA for the future” by Teruyoshi Amagai from Japan and “One case in which diarrhea and the nutritional status of the patient were improve because of the change from the half-digested formula to the elemental formula of the enteral nutrition” by Minoru Miyashita from Japan. Please do not forget that the next PENSA meeting will be held next year in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Please plan to submit your paper or attend the meeting to share our knowledge. There is another meeting in India this year; The National Conference of Nutrition Society of India and XIV National Conference of ISPEN in Chennai , India in 20-22 November 2008. Those who are interested can visit their website at www.ispen.org The tentative planning is that the PENSA board will meet there during the conference