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Developing Health Hazards: When established in 1798, the Public Health Service was authorized only to provide medical care for merchant seamen. It now has a threefold mission: to protect and improve the health of all Americans; to conduct and support research into the causes and cures of disease; and to develop better understanding and control of all hazards to health in man's environment—in the air, the water, and in the products he consumes—and of the accidents to which he is subject.
Water is only one of the vehicles that bring chemical pollutants into everyday life. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration estimates that Americans are exposed to more than 500,000 substances, usually over very long periods of time. Less than 10% of these substances have been cataloged in a way that would provide useful information concerning their effects on our environment. Slowly developing health hazards are not publicized because they lack the drama that would give them news value. Yet the evidence is now overwhelming that even very low concentrations of environmental pollutants can, in time, have disastrous effects through a number of indirect mechanisms.
In 1968 the Public Health Service was reorganized into three separate health agencies: the Health Services and Mental Health Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Consumer Protection and Environmental Health -Service, including the Food and Drug Administration, one of the agencies originally transferred into the Federal Security Agency in 1939. These three health agencies are directed by the assistant secretary for health and scientific affairs, who is aided by the surgeon general of the Public Health Service. |
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