Hong Kong’s health care services are the envy of many across Asia

Name: What started Hong Kong's third Covid-19 wave?
Uploaded: 2020-09-13T06:30:15.000Z
Duration: 5 min 38 s
Description: What started Hong Kong's third Covid-19 wave?

In Hong Kong, there is access to clean water, vaccinations and pre- and postnatal services for all residents, which helps prevent disease before it can strike. This is not the case for many of our neighbours in Asia, whose poorest suffer the most

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Residents submit their deep-throat saliva samples for Covid-19 testing at Ping Shek Estate in Kwun Tong on July 7. Despite Hong Kong’s socioeconomic gaps, residents have access to top-notch health care. Photo: Winson Wong

Gary Lai

Published: 2:30pm, 13 Sep 2020Updated: 9:26pm, 13 Sep 2020

Health care can be expensive, and governments have learned that prevention is the best way to avoid medical procedures and treatment. Unfortunately, in many parts of the world, even access to preventive medicine — including immunisation, a clean water supply and pre- and postnatal care for mothers — is not universally guaranteed. Hongkongers should be thankful they are entitled to these public health measures.

The Hong Kong government has ensured everyone has access to immunisation. Under the Hong Kong Childhood Immunisation Programme, almost all eligible young people are protected, free of charge, against a range of communicable diseases through a regime of shots and booster shots from birth through to sixth grade. Children from families that receive social assistance are also eligible, along with other children, for free flu vaccinations.

The World Health Organisation is working with a group of multilateral, bilateral and government agencies to bring diseases such as polio and measles under control in many developing countries. In Laos, the government is still working hard to control diseases such as measles, rubella, and hepatitis B. Agencies seem to have trouble delivering vaccines in rural communities. Hong Kong’s public health system, by comparison, is much more inclusive.

Hong Kong also has a ready supply of clean drinking water. The Water Supplies Department created the Hong Kong Drinking Water Standards so the city’s drinking water complies with WHO standards. These include limiting the amount of metals such as arsenic, lead, and mercury; pesticides such as DDT; disinfectants and their by-products including chlorine; inorganic chemicals such as fluoride and nitrate; organic chemicals such as benzenes; organisms such as E coli; and radioactive material.

Concerns about the city’s water supply in recent years have come from the last leg of journey, in the uncleanliness of water pipes in public housing estates. Those seem to be isolated cases that have been dealt with, though.

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What started Hong Kong's third Covid-19 wave?

Things are much worse elsewhere in Asia. In Pakistan, for example, much of the water supply in the capital, Islamabad, was found to lack chlorine. Without clean water, people often fall sick with diarrhoea, a major killer in the developing world.