Malaysiakini's recent coverage on the seasonal smogs from burning forests in Sumatra and Kalimantan has quite rightly cautioned that 'continuous hazy conditions will cause ill effects especially to those in the high-risk groups such as children, senior citizens, smokers, people who work outdoors in particular those suffering from asthma, bronchitis, pneumonia, chronic lung disease, cardiovascular problems, and allergies'.

The longer-term health effects of seasonal exposure to highly polluted air will remain conveniently ambiguous for the moment, but in fact we already have strongly suggestive data pertaining to short-term (acute) effects from such exposures, including excess mortality among the frail and elderly.

Narayan Sastry, a Princeton-trained demographer working at the Rand Corporation (a private think-tank in Santa Monica, California) published a paper entitled Forest Fires, Air Pollution, and Mortality in SE Asia in the February 2002 issue of the journal Demography (volume 39, number 1, pages 1-23).

In recent years, notable haze episodes have occurred in SE Asia in 1991, 1994, 1997, and 2002. 1997 was the worst of these, coinciding with an El Nino year which exacerbated the seasonal mid-year droughts and the ensuing fires which burned an estimated two-three percent of Indonesian land area (mostly in Sumatra and Kalimantan, but also affecting sizeable tracts in Irian Jaya, Sulawesi, Java, Sumbawa, Komodo, Flores, Sumba, Timor, Wetar as well as areas in Sarawak (west Malaysia) and Brunei).

Satellite imaging and remote sensing indicated that in Sumatra and Kalimantan alone, 45,600 sq km of vegetative cover were lost, comprising agricultural and plantations lands (50%), forest and brush (30%), and peat swamp forests (20%).