Pollutants and high risk groups. Overview.

I'd like to leave you with just a few points. If you think back again to the opening of this conference as to why we are concerned with increased susceptibility, however one might define it, I think the panels expanded upon Dr. Barth's opening remarks. The sponsoring agency has expressed its concern that the legal mandates under which the federal agencies are working require that high risk groups be specifically considered in the process of setting standards. We've had a lot of additional discussion this afternoon on the question of costbenefit analysis or risk-benefit analyses. I think that we should not forget the remarks of our colleagues from the clinical sciences who expressed the need for us to better understand the etiology of major disease problems and the environmental and occupational contributions to these problems. Certainly that will continue to be a major task in future years, and I think a lot of the speakers expressed the need to understand these issues from both the scientific and the social, and economic viewpoints. I think Dr. Dinman's remark about policy development reflected the kinds of judgments that people in labor and management are having to make every day. I'd like to spend a moment addressing the question of what have we learned. We can be reassured that people like Paul Kotin along with Carl Shy and Vaun Newill, who introduced me to this field, were asking the right questions when I came into the area a decade ago. Information that has been gathered by a careful, slow, scientific, progress is quite important. We now recognize that the questions we seek to answer about high-risk groups are inevitably much more complex than they appeared a decade ago. A number of the participants are impatient with what governmental agencies may have done, and that showed in our closing discussions. However, none of us should minimize the great progress that our country has made, both