DOCTORS' GROUP FOCUSES ON ENVIRONMENT

Author: By Peter J. Howe, GLOBE STAFF

Date: Sunday, October 11, 1992
Page: 31
Section: METRO

At a Harvard-MIT symposium sponsored by Physicians for Social Responsibility and attended by about 500 people, including two US senators, doctors were urged to make greater efforts to warn the public that many environmental problems are not just "Bambi, whales and tree-hugging" issues, as one participant said, but crises with grave impacts on human health.

"Physicians are among the most trusted people in society when it comes to health risks, but health considerations have been given quite low consideration in environmental policy," said Dr. Eric Chivian, a member of the Harvard and MIT faculties who organized the symposium.

"If people really understand the stakes of environmental degradation, that their health and lives are threatened, then they will demand much greater action," Chivian said.

Chivian and other leaders of Physicians for Social Responsibility helped found the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the 1985 Nobel peace prize for its work.

Sen. John F. Kerry told participants that compared with the nuclear warfare threat, dangers to humankind posed by environmental degradation are "even more compelling, more immediate and far more demanding than any other threat we now face."

Sen. Timothy E. Wirth (D-Colo.) said in his keynote address that "for the world's environment, the 1990s are the decisive decade. Time is running short. It is time to change direction."

Following this weekend's symposium, the physicians' group plans efforts to get doctors more involved in government environmental policy-making and to persuade medical schools to offer their students more instruction in the threats environmental problems pose to human health.

From studying global warming and ozone deterioration to monitoring the cleanup of nuclear and toxic-chemical pollution sites, doctors must be more involved in determining health risks and devising solutions, Chivian and other symposium participants argued.

For example, although global warming is usually studied for its possible threats to the earth's ecosystem, it also could cause big increases in certain cardiovascular diseases and infertility and acclerate the spread of communicable diseases, said Dr. Andrew Haines, chief of primary health care at University College and Middlesex School of Medicine in London.

The physicians' group also wants to urge agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which according to Chivian employ fewer than 10 physicians between them, to employ more doctors in studying and combatting health risks.

Dr. Philip Landrigan, chief of community medicine at Mount Sinai Medical School in New York, urged doctors to press for greater testing of chemicals used in workplaces and factories, saying that only 20 percent of industrial chemicals have been tested for their potential health impacts. More than 50,000 US residents a year die from chronic occupational diseases substantially caused by toxins, Landrigan said.

Also speaking at the symposium were Harvey V. Fineberg, dean of Harvard's School of Public Health; Arnold Weinberg, chairman of MIT's medical department; MIT professor Henry Kendall, a 1990 Nobel laureate in physics and chairman of the 100,000-member Union of Concerned Scientists; Abdullah Toukan, science adviser to King Hussein of Jordan; former congresswoman Claudine Schneider of Rhode Island; and Noel Brown, director of the North American office of the United Nations Environmental Programme.

The symposium is to continue today at MIT's Kresge Auditorium with sessions on the effects of ozone depletion, species extinction, population growth and warfare on human health.

HOWE ;10/10 LDRISC;10/12,19:19 ENVIRO11