ENG-1981 — Page 36

REVIEW

15

There has been a decrease over the past 10 years in farmers and fishermen. Just over half the working population were in production occupations, about one-eight in clerical occupations and less than one-sixth in service occupations.

The decline from 3.9 to 2.0 per cent of people employed in the primary sector was to be expected as 70 000 people a year move into New Territories new towns and rural land is being swallowed up by the secondary sector because it makes more productive use of it, as well as improving the quality of life for the people who move there. Over the past 10 years the proportion of the population in the New Territories rose from 17 per cent in 1971 to 26 per cent in 1981. The relative share of the population in the conurbation of Hong Kong, Kowloon and New Kowloon dropped from 81 to 73 per cent. The marine population in the same period dropped to less than two thirds of what it was in 1971.

Health

With the improvement in the general standard of living, the average life-span of both males and females in Hong Kong is now comparable with top developed countries. The expectation of life at birth in 1971 for a male was 67.4 years. Now it is 71.7. For females it was 75 years and now is 77.5. Females born in 1980 should live on average 5.8 years longer than males. The increase in average life-span in 10 years has been 3.4 per cent for males and 2.3 per cent for females. Life expectancy in Japan at 72.2 and 77.4 years is slightly higher than Hong Kong; but the Hong Kong figures are better than available statistics for the United Kingdom, the United States and Singapore.

Another prime indicator of our health standard is the infant mortality rate. There has been a substantial decline in the rate over the past 10 years from 17.7 per thousand in 1971 to 11.2 in 1980. The Hong Kong rate is lower than the United Kingdom, the United States and in Singapore, but not as low as the 8.9 per thousand in Japan. Hong Kong has eradicated the diseases of disability and mortality, such as smallpox, poliomyelitis and diptheria and reduced tuberculosis to the same manageable level as Western countries, eighth in incidence. And more of Hong Kong's people are now dying from the diseases of over-eating, cancer, heart disease and blood pressure.

Having, through prevention by immunisation, eradicated the killers and the disablers, Hong Kong is able to concentrate more upon curative health and upon rehabilitation. More resources are going into hospitals and into helping the blind, the deaf, the physically and mentally handicapped and the very old. The more we add to the quality of life, however, the more public health divides into maintaining the curative health of the economically active and the future problem that curative medicine itself compounds, namely the increasing number who, as a result of curative health, reach the natural degenerative stage of life. That sector is bound to expand as the crude birthrate drops to 17 per 1000 people, through family planning and the constraints of our highly competitive society and housing, which make the nuclear family more and more desirable.

Chinese medicine is playing a decreasing role in our curative medicine, though most people believe there must be something good in that art which has survived thousands of years. Not all its practitioners have disciplined themselves. Quackery and charlatans have invaded that healing activity. It has tended to become an industry for the manu- facture of aphrodisiacs and the genuine practitioners have retreated and become defensive about their art. The inflated claims of some acupuncturists haven't helped added to credibility. Acupuncture does relieve pain but it has no pathological basis. The aura of mystery which it has created extends, with perhaps more relevance, to the Taoist faith which may have in its disciplines the key to the conscious triggering of man's autonomic

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