Clean bill of health

Pollution is profitable. Major emitters harm our health and they have got away with it for far too long. But the government, as a whole, hasn't quite understood this yet. Nevertheless, we need a champion and the Environment Bureau must be our pollution buster.

One of the most urgent issues that environmental officials must tackle is improving air quality to the point where pollution no longer poses a significant threat to health, as it does today. The good news is that the government is finally reviewing Hong Kong's outdated air quality standards - called air quality objectives - which are currently so loose that they are, in fact, a licence to pollute. Lax regulation makes pollution profitable and people sick. The medical science is not in doubt.

If our officials had shown the same determination in tackling pollution as they did in dealing with avian flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome or swine flu, they would have acted a long time ago in a resolute manner.

In the face of infectious diseases, the Department of Health could hardly have asked the public whether they were willing to bear the cost of trying to prevent these illnesses. Health officials were expected to know what they needed to do.

We remember how hundreds of thousands of chickens and ducks were slaughtered to stop the spread of avian flu. Yes, some people complained about not being able to eat fresh poultry, how expensive imported meat became, and some even said that it didn't matter to them. But what had to be done was carried out for the sake of the community as a whole. Some financial assistance was given to farmers and poultry sellers to help them through that difficult period.

For most people, the fear was the possibility of dying within weeks of being infected. With air pollution, our health is affected over a much longer period. The health threat, while not immediately obvious, is no less real - the impact just takes longer to show up. The Department of Health is not involved in air pollution control. That's for the Environmental Protection Department, which does not really have a public health remit. Its officials are not health specialists - they focus on the presence of pollutants, not what they do to our health. This attitude comes through in the bureau's 'Air Quality Objectives Review' public consultation that poses a series of somewhat obvious questions. The first is whether Hong Kong's outdated air quality objectives should be revised and the second is whether health protection should be the key consideration.