Has health chief Ko Wing-man taken leave of his senses? His remarks on smoking and taxation are extraordinary for someone who is the Secretary for Food and Health. The Council on Smoking and Health has suggested doubling the tax, which would push the cost of a pack of cigarettes to HK$93 from HK$53. But Ko, according to The Standard , said, "We will definitely adjust the tobacco tax at the proper time to control the percentage of smokers," adding "but each time we consider increasing the tax, we take into account the affordability for citizens, especially those at the grass-roots level." As Clear the Air chairman Jim Middleton said, "The main idea of excise taxation in excess of inflation is to stop youth starting smoking, not whether grass roots can afford it, which encourages them to keep on smoking for heaven's sake." High levels of taxation are recommended by the World Health Organisation as the most effective way of discouraging people from smoking. A study in 1998 concluded that a conservative estimate of the annual health-related cost of tobacco in Hong Kong in 1998 was US$688 million with a range of US$469 to US$916 million. This included US$459 million for health care costs (US$341 million for medical care and US$118 million for long-term care) and US$230 million for productivity losses. About 23 per cent of the total costs and 28 per cent of the medical care costs were due to passive rather than active smoking. The proportion of the morbidity costs that fell on the public sector was 70 per cent for active smoking and 50 per cent for passive. In addition, there were 6,920 attributable deaths, of which 19 per cent were attributable to passive smoking. "If we add the value of attributable lives lost but deduct productivity loss due to premature death to avoid double counting the value of a lost life, the annual cost would be US$9.4 billion," the report said. Feeling sheepish? We see that Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying can't even deliver a new year speech without offending people. We are referring to his controversial sheep comments. The remarks did not go unnoticed by the financial community. Jim Walker, the founder and managing director of Asianomics, drew attention to them writing in Wee Bits , the company's daily newsletter. Wishing his readers a happy year of the goat, he noted that the goat was synonymous with sheep in Chinese mythology. "It was no surprise then that the hapless Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung - whose character would undoubtedly be the donkey if there were such an animal in the Chinese calendar - chose to extol the virtues of that most docile and compliant of creatures in his new year message to the people of Hong Kong." He added, "He had better hope that the pro-democracy camp doesn't decide this is really the goat's year and behave accordingly." Are ewe kidding? The discussion over whether we are entering the year of the goat, ram, or sheep has prompted a reader to suggest that maybe the Irish have a solution. The BBC website reported last year that a rare, hybrid animal that was part goat and part sheep was born on a farm in the Republic of Ireland. The animal, referred to as a "geep", is thought to have been the product of a mating that occurred between a goat and a ewe on Paddy Murphy's farm in country Kildare. Murphy said the cross-breeding was not intentional. The Irish Farmers Journal said it was the first time it had reported the birth of a healthy geep in Ireland.