Beware the history books.

• Author: Nader, Ralph
• Position: Elimination of health and safety regulations opposed

Dear Senators and Representatives:

You are urging a reduction of law and order for corporate fraud, crime, and other damage to the health and safety of the American people. By thwarting law enforcement in these critical areas, you are inviting the comment, "There they go again."

"They" are the political corporatists in your midst, such as the Heritage and Cato groups and the trade associations and corporate law firms filled with well-paid persons, who concoct schemes designed to leave Americans defenseless against hazards to their safety and their family budgets.

These same interests held sway with the Reagan and Bush Administrations. You'll remember some of their "achievements": stalling and weakening the lead-abatement standards; delaying the lifesaving warning label on aspirin products regarding Reye's syndrome and the deaths of children; rescinding the rule commonly known as the "air-bag" standard for years, which cost tens of thousands of American lives and still more injuries; refusing to issue health standards under the Safe Drinking Water Act until Congress compelled them to start doing so.

Notwithstanding your misguided zeal to undermine the government's police powers to safeguard domestic health and safety and prevent future forms of toxic and product-defect violence, you may yet wish to learn from recent Reagan-era history.

Early in 1983, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Frank Young announced a cut of 50 percent in the number of the agency's blood-industry quality-control inspections. As the National Hemophilia Foundation can inform you, that decision and the powerful influence of the blood industry led to years of delay in the use of the hepatitis test to screen out possible carriers of AIDS. As detailed in the new book The Coming Plague, "most of the world's blood and plasma supply, therefore, went unsterilized and untested for the first four years of the epidemic." Can we assume that you have seen or read about the tragedies that terminally afflicted thousands of Americans with hemophilia as a result of not wanting to "burden" the blood industry?

The Reagan Administration similarly rejected a request for several millions of dollars by government physicians to conduct an early regulation of tuberculosis. Now it will cost many multiples of that early budget request to control spreading tuberculosis, and a new drug-resistant strain that worries public-health officials.

The basic issue that should concern your consciences...