The clinician's role in environmental protection.

The clinically working medical doctors are insufficiently trained in epidemiology and community medicine. They are, therefore, not sufficiently aware of health related environmental factors. They cannot avoid the difficulties of generalizing clinical observations because of small numbers and the long latency period in chronic disease evolution. As centralization of treatment is not generally possible we must improve our systems for registration of environmentally induced disease and health monitoring of the population. Finally, the clinicians should be more concerned with follow-up of administrative disease preventing actions.