Excerpt from National Heart, Blood Vessel, Lung, and Blood Program: Annual Report of the Director of the National Heart and Lung Institute The quality and composition of our environment are important to the maintenance of health-the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. We can live only a few minutes without oxygen, a few days without water, and a few weeks without food. Many of the diseases addressed by the National Program on Heart, Blood Vessel, Lung, and Blood Diseases are known to be related to the quality of our environment. The impact of these diseases, as compared to that of other diseases, is summarized in Table 1. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.