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To the Editor.—We appreciate the thoughtful comments of Drs. Burg, Kelley, and Lane. We agree that it was unfortunate that adequate comparison studies of large numbers of medical students and pediatric residents could not be utilized, but studies of this type are not available in the literature. We also agree the number of child health associates was small and that it would have been desirable to have a larger number of child health associates from more than one program participate in this study, but there was only one child health associate program in existence at the time the studies were carried out and all of the students enrolled in that program were included. The population pools from which the comparison subjects were drawn were carefully evaluated, and the number of comparison subjects was appropriate for the number of experimental subjects studied.
Since pediatric interns at the University of