Environmental health research and regulation.

This symposium will present the results of our joint research effort. These reports will deal with the effects of both chemical and physical factors in the environment as they interact with organisms through a variety of pathways and produce a mul-tiplicity of biological effects. However diverse these studies appear to be, they all have one common objective: to produce experimental data which will help our understanding of the effects of environmental agents on human health. The results from these studies will be used in a number of ways to protect man from environmental hazards, including the development of better testing and prediction methods for agents not yet introduced into the environment , treatment modalities for use after exposure to hazardous agents, and the development of standards and other criteria that can be used to control the quantity and quality of pollutants released into the environment by industry and other sources. These first two products of our studies-tests and treatment modalities-because they are closely based on effects seen in biological systems, will be similar in both the United States and the Soviet Union and indeed in all countries around the world where environmental science is well developed. In the area of standards and other criteria to prevent environmental pollution, however, the approaches taken by our two countries and by other countries may be very different. Being scientists and working on a common set of scientific problems , we understand fairly well the similarities in our approaches to solving environmental health problems. But it is clear that we do not very well understand each other's approach to the process by which we regulate and control pollutants at their sources. It might be useful, therefore, to describe the approach taken by the United States in controlling the release of toxic substances into the human environment. The usual approach in setting environmental standards has been to consider the medium through which the pollutant reaches man, mainly the air, water, and land. Air In the United States, the Federal Clean Air Amendments of 1970 (Public Law 91-604) comprise the principal law through which the National Government , working through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), controls atmospheric pollution. The U.S. approach to protecting human health from air pollution has been to mount a broad-based research program to yield data on all potentially hazardous emissions to the atmosphere. National ambient air quality standards have been adopted only …