feeling of being about to choke. The bitter smell of smoke pervades everything. The lack of sunlight - one wakes to a morning mist that never clears-oppresses the spirit. Soot cakes the furniture indoors, covers clothes in grime and flavours the food. Drinking water has an unpleasant aftertaste. One can wash, but the dirt soon returns. People stay indoors, windows and doors are shut tight. The streets are deserted. As one householder explained, at the beginning of the week they could see the houses on the other side of the road. Then only the road was visible. Finally, the road disappeared. Pollution-related illness are believed to have already killed hundreds of people. But the smog appears to have played a major indirect role in the loss of many other lives. Two ships collided in the Straits of Malacca with the loss of 29 crewmen; an Indonesian jet crashed in northern Sumatra, killing all 234 passengers. In a region whose self-confidence has been severely shaken in recent weeks, the smog has been interpreted in the region as another symbol of disaster.The long term impact on the health of the countries in the grip of the haze- Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Papua New Guinea and Thailand - is impossible to gauge. City-dwellers in South-East Asia have long been used to breathing a noxious cocktail of car-exhaust fumes and industrial pollutants. Those with existing respiratory illnesses, eye and skin irritations and heart complaints will now find their conditions severely aggravated. But those free of such disease may start developing them.There seems little that the authorities can do. One Malaysian minister suggested that two million people should be moved out of harms way, but this idea was dismissed as being impractical. Another proposal was to sprinkle water from the skyscrapers to dissolve the soot. Ordinary people have resorted to the few countermeasures available to them. They loc...
