``Preventive medicine is what civil defense is all about,'' states DDP President Kenneth Lucas, MD.

The DDP exhibit at the Maricopa County Fair shows exactly what types of injuries a civil defense shelter is designed to prevent. There are photographs from Hiroshima; of victims struck by flying projectiles such as shattered glass; and of Iranian soldiers who sustained mustard-gas attacks in the Iran-Iraq War.

Such victims are not likely to be found in Switzerland. On a recent visit, Dr. Lucas photographed the Swiss Alps from the outside and the inside. His pictures show the ventilation equipment displayed in the mobile shelter as it is deployed in a normal Swiss home. The entrance to the garage where normal citizens can park their cars is probably just as secure as the entrance to the bunker designed to protect Washington policymakers: there are five blast doors in series.

The Arizona mobile shelter display will be at the Maricopa County Fair in Phoenix through March 27. From there, it will travel to Tucson for the Pima County Fair, which is open from April 10-19. At the two fairs, nearly one million Americans will have the opportunity to learn something about civil defense technology. DDP has also applied to enter the shelter in the Orange County Fair in California. This fair occurs at the time of the 10th annual meeting of DDP.

The DDP 10th annual meeting will be held at the Country Side Inn in Costa Mesa, California, July 11-12. Costa Mesa is located close to Disneyland, John Wayne Airport, and the Orange County fairgrounds.

The program is in the development stage. This year's update on environmental issues will include the public health aspects of pesticide bans. Dr. William Hazletine of the Butte County Mosquito Abatement District will discuss the increasing threat of disease vectors. Former DDP President Howard Maccabee, PhD, MD, will report on current theories of climatic catastrophe.

Also on the program: Arthur Robinson, PhD, of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine; Col. Warren Everett of High Frontier, and Nancy Greene. Col. Everett will speak about civil defense under President Kennedy. Intelligence analyst Nancy Greene will discuss changes in intelligence in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet empire. We hope that Petr Beckmann will be able to join us.

Mark your calendars now!

With many regulations, the primary effect on health and safety is indirect and results from diverting resources from their most effective use. For example, the projected costs of ``remediation of hazardous waste sites'' are now in the range of a trillion dollars or more, not counting legal fees. With such efforts, the projected cost per cancer avoided is estimated to exceed $15 billion (Science 255:901, 1992).

Some regulations have a direct cost measured in preventable deaths. One such set of regulations is CAFE, the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, developed by Samuel Skinner, then Transportation Secretary and now White House Chief of Staff. According to Sam Kazman, general counsel for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), these standards ``waste hundreds of millions of dollars, destroy thousands of jobs, handicap domestic automakers, and kill people by forcing them into smaller cars.'' On Feb. 19, the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in favor of CEI, which claimed that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration lied about the lethal effects of its 1990 CAFE standards. In an opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court wrote:

The effect of wetland regulations is analyzed in testimony by William Hazletine of the Butte County Mosquito Abatement District. He stated that cases of mosquito transmitted encephalitis in California increased from 28 in 1970-1979 to 72 in 1980-1989. The only effective control measure is to control mosquito breeding areas. But public safety is not one of the reasons for granting a permit to fill in a wetland. In response to an inquiry about how the bureaucracy would respond to a public health emergency, Dr. Hazletine was told that they would ``process our paperwork faster.''