—
Hon, John E, Fogarty of Rhode Island

House of Representatives, U. S. Congress

This is the second time within the past six months
that I have been privileged to attend the opening of a new
research facility of the Public Health Service, The first
was your parent agency, the Communicable Disease Center at
Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, a facility in which you
and the Nation can take justifiable pride.

We can be equally proud of the field station we are
opening today. Like the Center's headquarters, it is located
on the campus of one of the Nation's great universities - an
ideal place for research. The building and the equipment in
this Station have been designed and selected to give our
scientists every advantage in their search for answers to
the still unsolved problems of disease,

The University and its friends, whose great generosity
brought this building into being, and the people of the
Nation who will pay to keep it operating ~ we all expect
great things from the studies that will be conducted in this
new research facility. And I know that the men and women
who will labor here will do their utmost to see that we are

not disappointed,

 

To be delivered at opening ceremonies of the Communicable
Disease Center Laboratory, Public Health Service, U. S.
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Kansas City,
Kansas, Wednesday, April 5, 1961.
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The study of virus and fungus diseases for which this
Station was established demonstrates the importance of a
much broader research area that we are only beginning to
explore, namely, the whole relationship of man's modern
environment to his health.

It was at this Station, in its old makeshift quarters,
that one of the truly great research breakthroughs of this
century occurred. I refer, of course, to the work done here
on histoplasmosis, Thousands of patients were erroneously
treated in tuberculosis sanitaria, tens of thousands of
dollars were wasted on such treatment, before your work
here revealed that it was a fungus in the soil, not the
tubercle bacilli, that was rotting the lungs of so many
people in this section of the country.

In the dramatic story of histoplasmosis research I
believe there is a lesson that we as a Nation will do well
to heed.

It was when our scientists began to look for factors
in the environment, rather than within man himself, that they
found the source of histoplasmosis in soil rich in bird
droppings. Isn't it also possible that more intensive study
of our environment will yield clues to the prevention of

other diseases?
.

I ask, is it just a coincidence that lung cancer,
emphysema and other respiratory ills are 4ncreasing in the
areas where there is most air pollution? What is the
connection between hepatitis epidemics, broken down sewage
systems, septic tank suburbias? | Why are heart disease and
mental ills such big problems in the urbanized parts of the
world and almost unknown in the so-called underdeveloped
countries? We can't expect our doctors to give us all the
answers. We must study the environment itself.

We are not doing this. Worse, we are not even doing
the simple ordinary things we already know we ought to do
to protect ourselves in this fast changing world.

Within the next 15 years, we are going to puild the
equivalent of 12 cities as large as Chicago to take
care of our increasing population. Tf we follow our
present pattern, we will do it on a day by day, hit or miss
way. Invade more and more farmlands with housing develop-
ments and shopping centers. Add new highways when the old
ones can't bear any more cars. Bulldoze down more forests
to make room for more industries, Sewage and refuse will
be handled in whatever way seems easiest and cheapest
at the moment. Maybe heavy chemical dosage will keep our
drinking water safe.
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The only comfort we can take in this hodgepodge 1s
that, because each day's changes are slight, we are saved
from the shock of the sum total of change that results in
a year, or a decade, The impact of the whole horrible mess
we are creating never really hits us.

Yet we have warning signs aplenty that we are following
a dangerous road.

In a certain section of Tennessee, you can see a
strange sight - a grey, desolated wasteland right in the
midst of an area of green flourishing forests, There isn't
a bird, or a blade of grass, or any life at all in the
wasteland, Why? Air pollution - smoke and fumes from an
industrial plant miles away. Is this the air you want to
breathe?

That's the effect of air pollution you can see, But
there's another kind you can't see and it may be the most
dangerous of all, It spouts from the tailpipe of your car.
It spouts from 70 million other cars. And you breathe this
devil's brew. When a snowstorm hit New York City last
February and cars were barred from the city for two. days,
air pollution dropped 60 percent, The auto industry has
been mighty enterprising about getting us push button windows
and tailfins and a lot of other gadgets we could do without.
But what about devices that will stop air pollution? What

about seatbelts that would prevent fatal accidents?
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It is time and over-time for the auto industry to
show that it cares as much about our health and safety as
it does about our comfort.

Other industries also are big, are growing, are
polluting air, land, food, water. Must these industries
pollute as fast as they grow?

Thousands of entirely new chemicals are being used
every year with no study of the possible effect of lifetime
exposure to them, One of the féw chemicals that has been
thoroughly studied is the fluoride used in drinking water
to prevent tooth decay - a measure found to be entirely
safe and beneficial. Ironically enough, this measure has
encountered public opposition while, at the same time,
there is virtually no publie concern over the thousands of
unstudied chemicals we are absorbing into our bodies every
day.

Radioactivity is another hazard we know little about,
The more we learn, the more we realize how careful we must
be to cut down unnecessary exposure,

But we aren't doing it. The medical and dental uses
of X-ray have increased over 300 percent in the past 20 years.
But how many communities have any regular system for checking
whether the X-ray machines in doctors! and dentists' offices

are operating properly? I know of just one - New York City -
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and it's just getting started. In 17 States, shoe stores
can still use fluoroscopic shoe-fitting machines - machines
that are giving hundreds of children unnecessary doses of
dangerous radiation.

The Atomic Energy Commission is promoting more use of
atomic energy and radioactive materials in industry. That's
fine, That's progress - provided it can be done safely. But
what worries me 1s that this same AEC, which is responsible
for promotion, is also responsible for protection, That's
like putting a wolf to guard the sheep. I, for one, don't
like it. Last summer, when a spillover from a uranium plant
in New Mexico poured a quarter of a million gallons of
radioactive stuff into the San Juan River, the health
authorities didn't even know about it until citizens 65 miles
downriver reported dead fishhfloating by. I say our health
agencies, Federal, State, and local, should have clear-0ut
responsibility for the health and safety factors of radiation,
But along with that responsibility must go the funds and the
personnel to do the job. Most State and local health depart-
ments today are doing so little in radiation control it is
hardly worth mentioning, I also think the Federal Public
Health Service program is too little and too late.

Water pollution is another environmental hazard - an
old story to those of you who live along the Missiour River,
sometimes called the "thousand-mile sewer". I understand,

an
however, that both Kansas City, Kansas/ Kansas City, Missouri,
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have done their part to give the old river a petter reputation.
Kansas City, Missouri's overwhelming vote last fall of over
four to one in favor of the bond issue for sewage treatment
facilities is an inspiring example of enlightened citizen
action. It was almost as impressive as the 6 to 1 vote
Kansas City, Kansas, gave its bond issue in 1954.

Those were battles well won, but the big war for water
4s still ahead. Within two generations, there's been a
radical shift in our living patterns. Families who used to
have five rooms and a path now have five rooms and a path-or
even two or three baths, They also have dishwashers and
clothes washers and air conditioning systems - all taking
water. And at the same time that we are using more water,
we're polluting more water, Housewives are using millions
of pounds of detergents. If you draw a glass of water from
the tap on wash day in some communities, it foams like a
glass of beer, Industries are using 10 times as much water
as they did 60 years ago, We still have some pure streams :
but they're pure chemical, not pure water,

My own State of Rhode Island, along with 22 other
States, has a big shellfish industry. This industry has
peen outstanding in its insistence that its fish be raised
in wholesome waters, It is proud of its record. But that
record is getting more and more difficult to maintain,

Even the ocean is getting polluted as we dump more and
more radioactive and other waste into it. Recently, down in
Mississippi, some shellfish poachers took their crop from

a polluted area, This was quickly discovered and action
on, Eo
taken - but not before over 100 people got hepatitis, As
water gets scarcer, the tempation to tse unsafe water grows.
Last month it was a shellfish poacher in Mississippi, Next
month, it may be a farmer, or an industry, and you and I may
be the victims.

Where are the health officials, the food and drug
inspectors and all the other people we pay to protect us
from such hazards? They are on the job, I can assure you.
But there aren't enough of them and the problem is growing
so fast both in size and complexity that they can't keep up
with it.

Maybe you've moticed - I have ‘ the deterioration in
the food served on planes, trains and buses. Maybe you've
noticed - I have - that there have been a number of cases
of food poisoning on these carriers. There were two or
three on airlines last fall; a big one on a railroad in
Washington, D. C., a couple of years ago. It's the job
of the U. S. Public Health Service to see that passengers
get safe food, but how many inspectors do they have? How
many to protect the millions of people who are traveling
every day? I'll tell you. They have exactly 31. Is it
surprising that the food service is deteriorating? I'm
surprised that it is safe to eat at all when you travel,

What can you and I and every other American do to
make this modern world safe and to keep it that way? What
can we do about air pollution, radiation, water pollution,

food poisoning and all these other hazards?
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One thing we can do is use our specialists, give them
a chance to apply their knowledge of how to control pollution
and create safer cities, To do that, we must recognize that,
for better or for worse, most of us, and those who come after
us, are going to live in about 200 densely populated areas.
This means that we must think, plan and act in terms of a
whole metropolitan complex, not in terms of each separate
city and suburb. No part of the complex ean hope to wall itself
off from the problems of the other parts, Build a fine home
in the suburbs if you want but remember you can't shake
off the big city and its problems, It is still your city ‘
you couldn't live without it,

So, whatever town or suburb you call home, be prepared
to pay for metropolitan living - one way or another, Your
can pay for it by damage to health, by inconvenience, by
ugliness and increasingly unpleasant living conditions if
you continue to let matters draft. Or you can pay for
programs that will give you and your descendants a decent
place to live. The choice is still ours, but we'll have to
make it soon, because once buildings are up and pavements
are down, it's too late.

The second thing we can co is expand our research
program, We need to know the precise effect our rapidly
changing environment is having upon our health, We need to
find better and cheaper ways of building health protections
into our environment.

To get research of the scope needed and at the speed
needed, I have proposed that a National Environmental Health

Center be established, comparable to the National Institutes
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of Health, the world's greatest medical research center,

This ceremony, marking as it does the opening of a
new facility for studying two hazards of the environment
(viral and fungal diseases), seems to me an appropriate
time to announce that my proposal for a National Environmental
Health Center has now reached the blueprint stage,

This Center should have many buildings as fine as this
new field station, It should have over 30 different types of
laboratories where physicists, chemists, radiologists, bio-
chemists and other scientists would do research. The problems
they might solve by such research would help all communities
to have better and cheaper control of their environment. The
Center should be equipped with greenhouses and with a farm of
experimental animals so that, by testing pollutants on lower
forms of life, we could learn more about their effect on man,
Scientists from all parts of the world should be trained in
this Center.

Like the National Institutes of Health, the Environ-
mental Health Center should be the hub for an expanding
national program. It should provide grants to universities
and other research installations in all parts of the country.
It should serve as a clearinghouse and coordinating unit to
prevent duplication of effort and to see that every promising
clue is being followed,

The Nation's most productive years of medical research
came with the development of our National Institute of Health.

It spurred on the whole medical research movement, producing
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results far beyond thosé that can be directly traced to NIH
resources,

Similarly, I predict that, if we can develop a great
national center for environmental research, it will mark the
turning point from neglect to aggressive attack upon the health
problems of the modern environment.

Before such a Center can move from the blueprint to
the brick and mortar stage, however, we must know whether
the American people want it. There is no use perfecting our
ability to create healthful, beautiful and convenient cities
if we are going to ignore this knowledge and go on creating
ugly, Jerry-built, traffic-jammed urban sprawls.

The Congress of the United States, responding to the
will of the people, took medical research out of the doldrums,
Surgery is safer; diseases and disabilities that used to be
hopeless are now curable because we've gone all out for a
big natioal medical research program,

We can do the same to make our environment safer,
President Kennedy, in his messages on natural resources and
on urban affairs, pointed out the danger of neglect, He called
for more action on air pollution, water pollution, metropolitanism,
But he hasn't spelled out his proposals, Will they be big
enough? Will they come fast enough?

wWe stand at a turning point right now. We can silently
accept a future of cancer-laden smog and sewage-burdened
waters or we can rise up and demand action, big action, fast
action throughout the length and breadth of the land, The choice

is ours, but time is running out,
Some of us, some of our children, may already have
absorbed the poisons that, working slowly in our bodies,
will find their fatal targets 10 or 20 years from now.
That's how modern pollution works - slow, but deadly.

In this field station we dedicate today, we have
taken one step in the right direction, Let us follow it
with the giant stride that will enhance the potential of
this and of every other center for genuinely productive

research,

HAE