The Chairman of the American Medical Association's Committee on Environmental Health urged the nation's physicians to assume the leadership in efforts to remove health hazards from the environment.
James H. Sterner, MD, medical director of the Eastman Kodak Co., Rochester, NY, said that, "The control or reduction to acceptable levels of many of these environmental hazards will be difficult and costly. We will need the best intelligence possible to guide us in establishing valid criteria for action.
"The final value judgments, in balancing degree of risk or injury against the need or desire for the goods and services related to or responsible for the health hazards must not be arrived at lightly or capriciously," he said. "A needless or overly zealous control may well deprive man of values which he can ill afford to lose; on the other hand, a failure to act in a timely and energetic manner may result in a cost, measured in terms of suffering, illness, and death, which is completely unacceptable in relation to the benefit."