1 Department of Paediatrics, Dudley Road Hospital Birmingham, England
You will no doubt agree that it is highly desirable in scientific communications to use words precisely and with an agreed meaning. The word neonatal is by common convention applied to the first 28 days of life, yet there has been a tendency recently to extend that definition to include a later part of the infant period. This seems to have become particularly common in reports of so called neonatal hepatitis associated with the Australia antigen and the most recent example is in the report by Dr. Kattamis and colleagues.1