Waiting with bated breath for The Haze 2020

Science can be a tricky thing, and science news on the Internet even more so.

WHAT a difference a week or two makes. Just a fortnight ago we were choking on The Haze (really, don’t you think such a well-established phenomenon deserves capital letters?), now we are admiring clear blue skies.

The good news is that given that a fortnight “after” is just 20-odd fortnights before the next one, perhaps we should start preparing for The Haze 2020 right now.

Admittedly, just because it happened this year, doesn’t mean it’ll repeat itself again. In fact, an Indonesian official predicted that the haze the following year will not be as bad, given the country’s improved efforts at putting out fires. Only problem, he said this in 2018 about 2019, so who knows what 2020 will bring.

And what did he know, anyway? He was only the chief of Indonesia’s Peatland Restoration Agency. Science can be a tricky thing after all, and science news on the Internet even more so.

Take for example the advice to mitigate the haze by draping a wet handkerchief over the fan, as espoused by my so-called friends on Whatsapp. I’m told water droplets will magically capture all the dust and foreign matter. And it apparently works despite the fact that we live in a country where the humidity is a pretty constant 80%.

Never mind, I’ll keep my mask on to keep out the bad stuff.

By “bad stuff”, I mean those horrible ultrafine particles. Experts are concerned about particles less than 2.5 microns in size. If you breathe them in, they can damage the lungs and cause issues for those with existing issues, such as asthma.

There is also concern that the particles can damage the blood-brain barrier and such damage has been linked with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. It should also be noted that a lower dose of toxins is needed to cause damage if it’s the brain of a child. There is evidence that air pollution affects neurodevelopment in children, affecting mental and motor development.

How do I know this? I read reports from the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Children’s Fund about this that I found on the Internet.

So, wear a mask – but which one? The government recently decided to distribute conventional surgical masks in Sarawak, but according to doctors on Twitter (one of whom wrote a piece for an online publication), surgical masks are not good enough. It seems surgical masks are “of little value” and “cannot filter toxic gases and fine particles”.

Funny thing is, I read the opposite on the Internet. I mean, yes, the N95 masks do filter more out and work better. But surgical masks do a pretty OK job on their own, it seems.

For example, take this study from the University of Massachusetts which unsurprisingly concluded that “cloth masks are only marginally beneficial in protecting individuals from particles <2.5 µm”, but perhaps surprisingly said that the “surgical mask blocked about 60% of .03 micron particles and over 90% of 1 micron and 2.5 micron particles”. So it’s either 60% efficient or 90% efficient depending on your particle of choice.

Of course, all these numbers are probably exhausting to the layman, we should all just wear the better masks – never mind if they’re three to six times more expensive.

(By the way, Facebook says you must wear the masks the green side out. Presumably the dust knows how to avoid you based on the colour.)

In all this, one question seems to have missed the experts: What do the children wear? The N95 mask is too large for small faces, and even the surgical masks don’t fit

One question seems to have missed the experts: What do the children wear?

properly. So what I have seen is parents buy cloth masks nicely decorated with Hello Kitty characters – but we know (courtesy of our friends from Massachusetts) that these aren’t very efficient (and probably as good as nothing).

I tell you what is efficient, though: The ability of ultrafine particles to kill children exposed to them. An estimated 600,000 deaths of children under 15 years old can be attributed to ambient and household pollution in 2016. Air pollution accounts for almost 10% of deaths in children under five. And in low/medium income countries in South-east Asia, 99% of children under five are exposed to more air pollution than deemed safe. (It’s all in that WHO report I referenced earlier.)

The truth is that while we debate what masks to wear, how to wear them, and even if we should wear them inside out, nobody seems to be discussing the fact that our children are dying. One estimate by a Us-led study was that more than 100,000 people would die prematurely as a result of the 2015 haze, with around 6,500 of them Malaysians .

So I’m tempted to ask our authorities, how many premature deaths will there be this time round? Except that the last time round authorities in the region rejected the findings. Officially, Indonesia said there were only 19 deaths, and Malaysia said there were none, and of the deaths, commented that there was “no such thing!”

The thing about stuff on the Internet is that without being an expert it’s quite hard to make valid conclusions, and more information doesn’t mean better or correct information. Findings have a lot of caveats, and to a certain degree we must depend on experts to interpret the findings (or to outright say something is false).

Thing is, “no such thing” isn’t really a conversation, and if the authorities aren’t talking about it, then who will? Who will be that neutral party who curates the facts we need?

Perhaps all will become clearer eventually. In the mean time, all we can do is wait with bated breath for The Haze of 2020 to come upon us.

Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make sense of life’s vagaries and contradictions. Write to Dzof at lifestyle@thestar.com.my. The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.