REMARKS
By
Hon. John E. Fogarty of Rhode Island
House of Representatives, U. S. Congress

It is a great honor and privilege to be here with you today
to dedicate this new Center for the study of communicable diseases.
My congratulations to you, Dr. Burney and to your staff of
physicians and scientists. The battles against epidemics that
you have fought and won at CDC, the mysteries of the test tube
that you have studied and solved - such solid successes; often
achieved in makeshift facilities, justified these fine new
buildings. I am sure you feel a warm sense of gratification to
see your dreams realized and many of us in Congress, who have
fought year after year for the building funds you needed, share
that feeling.

The great significance of this Center, however, to us and
to people everywhere, is that it brings into active operation one
of the world's best equipped facilities for the study and control
of those diseases that account for two-thirds of all the physical
miseries suffered by mankind. We expect great things from the
men and women who will labor in these laboratories and, if it
is true that "the past is prologue", we shall not be disappointed.

A dedication ceremony in Georgia may seem a strange place
for a Congressman from Rhode Island to launch a campaign, but,
with your help, that is what I would like to do today. I hope
that, as we add this new installation to our research armamentarium,
we will begin a campaign for bringing into wider use those rich,

life-saving gifts that will come from this Center and that are

 

To be delivered at Dedication of the Communicable Disease Center,
Public Health Service, U. S. Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare, Atlanta, Georgia, September 8, 1960.
already pouring out of the Nation's research laboratories in ever
growing volume.

The need for such a campaign struck me forcibly this summer
because, as you know, my own State of Rhode Island has been the
scene of the most serious polio epidemic that has occurred this
year. Some 70 Rhode Islanders, many of them little children, have
already been crippled and the epidemic is still raging. Yet more
than five years ago, a 90 percent effective method of preventing
polio came from the research laboratory of Dr. Jonas Salk,

When tragedy strikes home, we tend to feel that we have
been singled out, that our misfortune is something unusual in an
otherwise happy world. But I have learned from my friends in the
Public Health Service that the Rhode Island story is but a small
chapter in the great tragedy of unused health knowledge which the
American people are writing every day.

Here are a few of the facts they have given me:

Two hundred and sixty thousand people die every year from
cancer. Some 75,000 of them could survive if present knowledge
about cancer were fully applied.

At least half of the crippling from fractures, strokes and
arthritis is unnecessary.

For more than 20 years, we have had the technical power
to stamp out syphilis, yet 200,000 children and youths under 20
contracted a venereal disease last year and the number is increas=
ing every year.

Strep sore throat ranks second on the list of communicable

diseases reported to the Public Health Service - tens of thousands
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of cases each year. Yet only a few lucky ones get the prolonged
treatment that will protect them from heart disease and every year
some 20,000 of the unlucky, untreated ones die of rheumatic fever
or rheumatic heart disease.

I could go on with this sorry tale of needless death,
crippling and suffering, but what interests us more is how can it
be stopped?

Well, I can tell you that it won't be stopped by simply
wagging a finger at the public and accusing them of apathy,
stupidity or perverseness. I have been dealing with the public
for a good many years and I haven't found them apathetic about
health, If there are people so dumb or so cussed that they want
to be crippled or killed, I've never met them and I've met a lot
of people. Whenever the budget for health research comes up, and
whenever it looks like it might be trimmed - as it always does
these days - my mail is flooded. And those letters don't come
from a buneh of scientists who want to ride a gravy train. They
come from parents who have lost a child from an incurable disease,
They come from friends, neighbors, relatives of those who are
suffering from a disease the scientists do not yet understand.

The American people want life-saving answers, no matter what it
costs to get them, and if they want the answers that bad, it stands
to reason they want those answers used once they are found.

So let's get over this phony excuse of public apathy and
look at a few hard facts, the chief one being that 19th century
health machinery doesn't fit a 20th century society.
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A lot of people still seem to think that if they have a
good doctor, they can relax and rely entirely on him to look after
their health. Maybe some of their doctors believe it too. But I
say that's a 19th century idea. I'm a labor man and this attitude
reminds me of the line management used to peddle back in those
days - leave everything to the wisdom of the managers and they'll
see that labor and the public are looked after. "Industrial
problems are much too complicated for mere citizens and workers
to understand” . Well, it's been a long time since that line had
any followers in the ranks of management, labor, or the public.
The people, through their government, labor, through its unions,
together with management, are all actively involved in the big
industrial issues.

Similarly, the big health issues of today are so broad
that they cannot possibly be solved by any one group or profession,
If the builders of our super-highways and irrigation ditches leave
breeding places for mosquitos, you are going to risk outbreaks of
encephalitis, a disease that is often fatal, and you cannot expect
the medical profession to stop it. If the city planners take no
heed of health, allowing our ears to be deafened by jet plane
take-offs and our lungs to fill with auto exhaust fusne. can the
medical profession alone protect us? And if people begin to die
off like flies 20 years from now because man and his industries
persist in putting poisons into the air, the food and the water,
shall we say that the doctors failed us?

Even in the specific attack against specific diseases, there

is good evidence that medical action alone is not sufficient. Can
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it be that we are sacrificing lives on the sacred altar of doctor-
patient relationship? Is it true that the individual doctor in
his office is the only one who can control our health destiny?

Or are there better or additional ways to assure universal
immunization, to find disease in the symptomless stage when it

is still curable, to dry up the reservoir of infectious syphilis
that is rotting our youth, to eliminate the disabling side effects
of chronic illness?

I note that a technical committee on polio vaccine has
advised Surgeon General Burney that mass community programs may be
the best and safest way to administer the live polio vaccine when
it becomes available next year. But among the groups that have
peen suggested to help recommend plans for communities to follow,
I saw only members of the medical profession. Isn't this the old
"management knows best" approach? I can't believe that you have
to know what an antibody looks like to be able to judge whether a
plan for getting everybody to swallow a candy pill is going to
work. I'd like to see the people who are going to get sick as well
as the people who will be paid for curing them have a voice in
such plans.

I'd also like to see them have a voice - a real voice, not
just token representation - on a lot of other health issues: mass
sereening clinics to find the people who need medical treatment
but don't know it; nursing home standards; organized home care
programs; environmental health plans, to mention only a few that

are usually dealt with along strictly professional lines. I'd
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like to see health officers! jobs be just as dependent on the
approval of the consumers of health services as they now are on the
approval of organized medicine.

In calling for militant citizen action on health issues, I
do not underestimate the contribution the medical men, in-
dividually and through their professional organizations, have made
and will continue to make. The high level of health enjoyed by
the American people is powerful testimony to the brilliant and
dedicated service we have received from the members of the medical
profession.

It is not they who have failed but we who have failed by not
recognizing that changes in the makeup of our society and changes
in the nature of its health problems call for public as well as
professional action on an ever-widening area of health issues.

As we dedicate this great Center for applied research,
let us also dedicate ourselves to seeing that the knowledge
gained here is indeed eweatat. Let the ingeniousness of the
scientists employed here be matched by our own ingeniousness
in adapting old ways, finding new ways, challenging tradition
if necessary, to assure that, when knowledge leaves the laboratory,
it reaches promptly all the people, rich and poor, young and old,
whose health it can protect. To this purpose I, as a Congressman,

representing the American people, dedicate CDC.

HEE