104
HEALTH
peninsula, and in the New Territories at Kwai Chung, Rennie's Mill Village and Cheung Chau, is also a function of the Pest Control Section.
The Health Education Section continued to organise publicity campaigns on various aspects of health and hygiene and to run food hygiene course for food handlers. Other public health courses were also conducted for specific groups of the public. To promote health education among school children, an annual 'Health Project Competition' for secondary schools and 'Speech and Song Contests' for primary and secondary schools were held.
The supervision of abattoirs, markets and hawkers has an im- portant bearing on public health, and for this purpose the Urban Services Department employs a staff numbering over two thousand. There are 66 public retail markets (43 in the urban areas and 23 in the New Territories) where housewives can buy meat, fish, poultry and vegetables at reasonable prices and under clean and hygienic conditions. The Urban Council is committed to an exten- sive programme for the reconstruction of the many old and out- moded markets where it is difficult to maintain the necessary standards of food hygiene. At the same time, new markets are planned to serve the populations of the developing areas.—
Progress on the implementation of the Urban Council's policy of working towards a reduction in street hawking has been hampered by lack of manpower for control and law enforcement, but much useful work has been done on the revision of legislation on hawking, the clarification and codification of points of detail in the policy and on the building-up of reliable data for forward planning. As a result of a re-organisation and substantial expansion of hawker licensing facilities in the urban areas in late 1969, a new organisation known as the Hawker Liaison Section was introduced. This section has already obtained a considerable quantity of accurate data on hawkers from which it is clear that the actual numbers of people earning a livelihood from hawking are smaller than had previously been supposed. Unlicensed hawking has declined sharply and the present total of 47,000 valid licences is believed to present a more accurate idea of the hawker population than heretofore. More attention is now being given to collecting information on the socio-economic aspects of hawking.