Proclamation 3824—American Heart Month, 1968

Heart and blood vessel diseases continue to be our Nation's number one killer.

More than fourteen and a half million American adults definitely have heart disease. It is suspected that another thirteen million are similarly afflicted. Heart and circulatory diseases take more lives in our country every year that all other causes of death combined. Their legacy is pain, disability and sorrow in millions of families. Their cost to the nation exceeds twenty-five billion dollars annually.

In recent years physicians and medical scientists have scored impressive gains in the struggle against heart and blood vessel disease. In the past year alone there have been new breakthroughs in heart surgery, and new triumphs in drug treatment. These and a host of other developments will save the lives of many men and women, and lengthen the lives of many more. The outlook is brighter for heart victims everywhere.

Yet our great advances cannot obscure the magnitude of the task that still confronts us. We have far to go before we eliminate diseases of the heart and blood vessels as serious threats to life and health.

Tomorrow's advances—like today's achievements—will depend upon expanded programs of research, training, education, and service. For leadership in this critical effort, we shall look, as we have in the past, to the American Heart Association and other private and professional groups, to the National Heart Institute and the Heart Disease Control Program of the Public Health Service. Together, these constitute a creative partnership of government and private endeavor, dedicated to a common purpose and sustained by a concerned citizenry.

With the unremitting support of all Americans, we can move ahead, a triumph at a time, toward ending the threat of heart and circulatory disease to the well-being of our people.

The Congress, by a joint resolution approved December 30, 1963 (77 Stat. 843), requested the President to issue annually a proclamation designating February as American Heart Month.

Now, Therefore, I, Lyndon B. Johnson, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim the month of February 1968 as American Heart Month, and I invite the Governors of the States, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and officials of other areas subject to the jurisdiction of the United States to issue similar proclamations.

I urge the people of the United States to give heed to the nation-wide problem of the heart and blood vessel diseases, and to support all essential programs required to bring about its solution.

In Witness Whereof, I have hereunto set my hand this thirty-first day of January, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty-eight, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and ninety-second.

LYNDON B. JOHNSON