Proclamation 4034—Save Your Vision Week, 1971

The greatest tragedy of blindness is that it may be needless.

Much can be done to preserve sight by regular and thorough eye examinations, beginning early in life, and by promoting eye safety on the job, in schools, and at home.

Early detection can prevent glaucoma and prompt treatment can restore the vision lost because of cataracts. Healthy tissue can be transplanted to restore sight.

On the other hand, there are many causes of blindness or visual disability that science cannot yet prevent or treat. Only research can provide the answers to visual problems such as disorders of the retina, inherited vision defects, and blindness from long-standing diabetes.

The Federal Government conducts and supports such research in the recently established National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health and in laboratories across the Nation. This effort by the Government complements the many excellent activities of private and voluntary groups in supporting research and in providing services to the blind and visually handicapped.

In an effort to make Americans better aware of how sight may be preserved, the Congress by a joint resolution approved December 30, 1963 (77 Stat. 629), requested the President to proclaim the first week in March of each year as Save Your Vision Week.

Now, Therefore, I, Richard Nixon, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim the week of March 7, 1971, as Save Your Vision Week; and I invite appropriate officials of State and local governments to issue similar proclamations.

I call upon all our citizens to join in this observance by learning how visual disabilities may be prevented and by seeking professional attention for themselves and their families for vision problems. I also encourage them, and the communications media, the health care professions, and other interested organizations, to support research aimed at conquering those diseases and conditions against which we now have no defense.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this fourth day of March, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred seventy-one, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred ninety-fifth.

RICHARD NIXON