Zhong Nanshan, a medical scientist and academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that air pollution is even more hazardous than severe acute respiratory syndrome since no one can escape it. That the incidence of lung cancer has risen by 55 percent in Beijing in the past decade vindicates what Zhong said.

The risk air pollution poses to residents' health is real, and it is high time that we took it seriously. True, we do need a long-term strategy to clean up the air we breathe. We need to revise our air pollution control law, which needs to levy even heavier fines on polluters and have more specific stipulations about the measures the government should adopt when the air is seriously polluted.

However, Rome was not built in a day. While a long-term strategy is in the pipeline, we can still do a lot to reduce the hazardous emissions polluting the air.