Nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell Medical Center have been honored today with The DAISY Award for Extraordinary Nurses.

One in every 3,000 babies is born with an inborn error of metabolism — a genetic defect that interferes with their ability to process substances like carbohydrates, proteins and fats. Until recently, tests to detect many of these very rare, disabling, and sometimes fatal disorders like fatty acid oxidation disorders were rarely used. If the child died, the cause would be listed as unknown or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). If they survived, they would experience a range of symptoms and medical problems throughout their lives such as delays in development, seizures, difficulty with growth and autistic behavior.

Over the last four years, heart specialists at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center have implanted an innovative aortic heart valve replacement using a catheter-based approach that does not require open-heart surgery in a total of 100 patients — the most of any U.S. medical center to date.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center will create a New York City Elder Abuse Center in order to improve intervention and treatment for elder abuse cases in the New York City area. The first center in the New York area to focus on coordinating elder abuse cases, the Center has received grants totaling $375,250 — $300,000 from the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation and $75,250 from the FJC, A Foundation of Philanthropic Funds — to develop the first phase of the Center's operations. It is expected to begin operations later this year.

Spring and summer are not the only seasons that bring misery to those with allergies. The winter months can be brutal for people young and old who are sensitive to mold spores and dust mites.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital ranks first in New York City and sixth in the nation, according to the 2007 U.S.News & World Report "America's Best Hospitals" survey. It is the seventh consecutive year that NewYork-Presbyterian is the only New York metropolitan-area hospital on the magazine's "Honor Roll," which lists the top 18 hospitals nationally based on reputation, mortality rates and other patient-care-related factors.

Six surgical transplant teams, including 40 clinicians, working simultaneously in six operating rooms successfully performed New York City's first three-way kidney transplant at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia. Three patients, who otherwise had no compatible donor, received lifesaving kidneys.

An influential teacher to neonatal students, residents and colleagues all over the world, Dr. Richard A. Polin, director of the Division of Neonatology of the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian and professor of pediatrics at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, was awarded the Neonatal Education Award in Perinatal Pediatrics by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).