Sai Kung shows it's a part of 'Healthy City'

The Sai Kung District Council was forced to cancel its dragon boat race last year because of low turnout after the Sars outbreak. The $600,000 funding for the event went instead to its Healthy City initiative.

With the cash, the programme leader rented a van to visit residential estates and taught residents how to disinfect their flats and check for faulty sewage systems.

Temperature checks were set up in MTR stations on the Tseung Kwan O line, and 10,000 people volunteered to be health ambassadors to go into high-risk areas such as elderly peoples' homes and schools to teach people how to prevent Sars.

These are some of the projects under the district's Healthy City programme, a movement initiated by the World Health Organisation. A total of eight district councils in Hong Kong have joined the volunteer programme.

Representatives from the Sai Kung and Kwai Tsing district councils will meet their regional counterparts in the first WHO Asia Pacific Healthy City alliance meeting in Malaysia in October. There will be about 30 representatives from countries including Vietnam, Japan and the mainland.

'The importance of this meeting is to allow for an international dialogue and to allow the cities to learn from each other,' said Lam Ching-choi, a Sai Kung District Council member who is in charge of the Healthy City programme. 'It would allow us to see what others are doing and to reinforce what we are doing correctly.'