Watch out: smog is here!

Not long ago, the winter weather (or at least mild winter) would set in by the first week of November.

Now, it is the first week of November, and still, no one is seen wearing warm clothes.

For the last two years, the Punjab areas have been deprived of charming dusk hours of November.

It is smog.

Every day, layers of smog descend upon cities and plains preventing sunshine reaching the earth.

Smog.

Smog, a relatively new phenomenon in Lahore and other parts of Punjab, is the polluted crop, which we are reaping for uncontrolled and unplanned industrialisation and lack of environment-friendly measures.

Earlier, in every December, thick layers of fog would blanket the horizon making the visibility rate too poor to drive on Motorway and land at the Lahore Airport.

But smog, a major health hazard, is something else: the choking layer is smoke, a mixture of polluted air and water vapor in the atmosphere. Unlike fog, which descends upon plains and cities by the evening, the greyish smog falls in the daytime and refuses to vanish till midnight.

With smog have come health advisories: people need to remain indoors, avoiding unnecessary exposure to the air; people need to cover their eyes, nose, and ears or they can suffer irritation; people need to increase liquid intakes to avid respiratory ailments. Children, senior citizens and those suffering from lung and heart ailments need extra preventive measures. In short, smog can harm human health to a great degree.

Prevention is better than cure; besides following preventive measures, the public at large should press the government to awake to the situation arising from environmental issues and make the environment a major priority. Preventive measures could have averted the rise of smog.

Still, it is better late than never.

The government needs to look into factors contributing towards the smog phenomena. The choking smoke stems from traffic emission and industrial fumes that cause smog when they interact with sunlight and water vapors. The government blames the wisps of smoke rising from the burning stubbles in Punjab farms for smog. This is a great miscalculation. For decades, the farmers have been burning stubble at the end of every crop season; now the smokes billowing from farms have just aggravated the smog levels. Several cities, far from agriculture farms, such as Los Angeles, Beijing, Mexico City and Tehran, have also been invaded by smog.

Once the core issue is detected, the government should come up with preventive measures. One such effective measure can be banning cars on certain days in cities to lower the level of smoke emission. The government can introduce laws to discourage the use of old cars and other over ten years old vehicles. The industrial units emitting more carbon and smoke should be fined or sealed. The use of machinery and vehicles using diesel should heavily be taxed because they also release emissions which pollute the environment.

Toxic fuel emitting generators have become a must part of every factory and shop. That speaks volume of the power shortage issue. The government has commissioned coal-fired power units across Pakistan, and one such power plant is already functioning in Sahiwal. The plant should close if research finds it harming the health of air quality.

Lately, the media has been reporting that the Punjab government is going to introduce a smog policy. That is a welcome development but the public at large should also chip in their share to change their approach towards the environment.

As it is smog everywhere, it should be everyone’s issue.

Hostility in hospitals

Aloofness and coolness run high in the public hospitals of Punjab where the ruling party’s prime focus has been on building carpeted roads and dedicated routes of mass transit in Lahore and some other big cities for years. The ruling family – the House of Sharif – runs a commercial medical complex but they prefer foreign medical centers for their own treatment. Taking a cue from their indifference towards public hospitals, doctors and paramedics become hostile towards the patients. 

No doubt, public hospitals are crowded with patients and their worried attendants where overworked doctors and nurses try to cope with painful situations with their occasional smiles and frequent frowns. 

A brazen display of inhospitality was, however, at display in the Raiwind Tehsil Headquarters Hospital where the staff refused to admit a woman, resident of the area, who was writhing in severe labor pains. Her husband was told that the gynecologist was not present. Unavailability of the bed would have been another valid excuse. Her husband, a petty brick kiln laborer, had no much bucks in his small pocket to take her to a nearby private maternity home. As the time was up, the husband with the help of passersby women did the labor work on a pavement on the hospital premises and a newborn baby gave his shriek in the world, ruled by Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif. 

The baby might know once he is grown up that it had all happened at a place, hardly few kilometers from the palatial residential and the commercial medical complexes of the Sharifs.  

The case of the Raiwind woman is among the very few incidents capturing the attention of the media; earlier, a Kasur woman who had died unattended outside the Jinnah Hospital was a big story. The health beat of media houses is most of the time focused on lucrative health authorities, and not the healthcare issues. 

Regardless of the media poor coverage of health care issues, it is an open secret that public hospitals suffer from several issues. Lack of space in hospitals and lack of professionalism among doctors and paramedics are amongst the top issues of the ailing sector. 

The sector has no much room for negligence as it involves human lives.

The government, over the years, has tried to improve the health care system with cosmetics measures. Recently, a motorcycle ambulance fleet was introduced without any piloting. Its fate is not difficult to predict. In 2012, the same chief minister had launched a fleet of mobile health units in south Punjab districts, and within four years, the whole fleet has come to a halt, rusting in yards. The project was also launched without any proper piloting studies. But who cares about the public exchequer which is wasted on the projects arising from the whims of the chief minister? Besides these two projects, the things on the credit of the chief minister are surprise visits to public hospitals, and every visit ends up with the suspension of a few top doctors from the job. After a few months, those doctors are back to the office, and the life goes on.  

The Punjab government, which has done lots of work on roads infrastructure and landscape, should turn to public hospitals. The government has the ability and resources to make hospitals a welcome place where sufficient space and professional staff are available to patients. 

Use the Raiwind road birth an opportunity to bring about one million changes to public hospitals, starting from the very Raiwind hospital.