Surprisingly ( for PPRUNE ) all good, well thought out, informative posts...except of course Tosco
Roxy, HKG has one of the highest life expectancies in the world....thats now, we will see in 15-20 years when the younger population are approaching middle age and the children have had 15-20 years of breathing this disgusting crap that on a good day is 5 times the WHO limit, on a bad day 20 times, those bad days are getting more and more regular.
Of course, a statistic that is not available is quality of life, sure you might live to 70 or 80, but you might spend a lot of time at the doctors, and wheezing, coughing and hacking like so many do around here. There are approximately 7,000,000 doctor/hospital visits every year attributed to pollution.
I also think there are an alarmingly, abnormally high number of my colleagues whose family members have had brushes with death, more than a dozen out of 400 pilots in 3 years.
If someone put a gun to your head and said " heres xxxxxxxxxxHKD and if you accept this I will pull the trigger and you have a 1-5000 chance of dying " what would you do ? ( roughly 1500 die from pollution here each year )
Unfortunately kids don't have the option of saying yes or no, they rely on their parents to do the right thing by them.
You could smoke a pack of smokes a day for your entire life and die of old age, or you could die at 30, again, are you willing to take the risk and do you have the right to make your kids accept that risk ? ( not you personally )
Check this site out, the guy that started/runs it has moved back to the UK due to his ill health which he attributes directly to HKG, as every time he went home he got better
HEI - Home
To answer your question, yes the pollution has had a strange and profound effect....its made all my belongings and my family move 8000Ks south
