Proclamation 4739—National Medic Alert Week, 1980

Emergency medical care, like other elements of our Nation's health care system, depends for its effectiveness on the support of the American people. By contributing to the lifesaving capabilities of rescue personnel and other health professionals, we improve our prospects for continued good health.

Today, approximately forty million Americans are afflicted with diabetes, heart conditions, epilepsy, allergies and other medical conditions that are difficult to detect or identify in an emergency. This year, many of these people will become involved in emergency situations and, because of delays in diagnosing and treating their hidden medical problems, may suffer additional injury or even die.

Such tragedies need not occur. For more than two decades, special identification and information services?the oldest and perhaps best known of which is Medic Alert Foundation International?have been helping health and rescue personnel meet the unique emergency needs of people with hidden medical problems. When the victims of medical emergencies are unconscious or otherwise unable to communicate, their medic alert tags and the information services with which they are registered can spell the difference between successful treatment and serious, even fatal, complications. Last year, these tags and services helped save the lives of an estimated two thousand people with hidden medical conditions.

Millions of additional Americans can protect themselves and help to improve the effectiveness of emergency medical care in this country by registering with a medic alert service. To focus the Nation's attention on the value of these services, the Congress, by a joint resolution approved February 28, 1980, (H.J. Res. 434) requested that the President proclaim the week of April 6 through 12, 1980, National Medic Alert Week.

Now, Therefore, I, Jimmy Carter, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim the week of April 6, 1980, as National Medic Alert Week. I urge all citizens and interested organizations and associations to observe this week with activities that will foster the use of emergency identification and information services in the United States.

I invite the Governors of the States and appropriate local government officials to support National Medic Alert Week activities, and I call upon the Nation's mass communications media to spread the message that medic alert services save lives.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this twentieth day of March, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fourth.

JIMMY CARTER