When the mother of engineer Ahmad Bungsu Hamid fell ill from the smoke which has shrouded Malaysia for weeks, he invented a machine for cleaning the air in his house. It was featured in a newspaper on Monday as Ahmad's "haze-buster". Calls to his home did not stop all day.
"I even had people begging me to sell them the machine and telling me their mothers were also sick from the haze," he said. However, he did not want to make money out of his Heath Robinson-type device, which consists of three water sprinklers, pipes, a tank, a pump, a zinc roof and wire mesh.
Extensive testing will be required to determine the efficiency of the invention in Ahmad's Petaling Jaya home, but the extraordinary interest in his machine is evidence of growing concern in Malaysia about the effect on health of airborne pollutants, and how little people know about dealing with them.
United Nations officials said yesterday it will be years before the effects of the persistent haze over South-east Asia will be known. Computer models show that after a short breather (literally) the haze is likely to thicken again over much of Malaysia and stay around until November. Kuala Lumpur airport was closed for a time yesterday morning when the smog returned.
The Malaysian government has recommended sprinkling water from the tops of buildings to clean the air, but a scientific observer argued yesterday that the polluting particles are so fine they can survive sprinkling and downpours, and penetrate the more common face masks.
The haze is essentially wood smoke, said Ahmad Hashem in a newspaper article. This is a soup of irritants and carcinogens, such as creosote, soot, ash, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, acetaldehyde and formaldehyde. The irritants can cause immediate health problems and the carcinogens long-term trouble.
As smoke disperses larger particles fall out, leaving finer ones airborne. Only one-thousandth of a millimetre in diameter, they behave as air and move according to the wind conditions. As air makes way for falling drops of water, the fine particles move around the droplets from spray and rain, and remain suspended.
This explains why even after a thunderstorm in Kuala Lumpur on Monday the air remained hazy. Only wind from the sea is really effective in shifting the pollutants away. Many of the face masks being sold at exorbitant prices are for filtering out dust, sand and other large particles in workshops, Mr Ahmad said. Surgical masks, which some entrepreneurs sell by the roadside, are designed not to keep out particles but to prevent saliva being ejected accidentally.
As the uncertainty and apprehension grow, so, too, does anger at neighbouring Indonesia. Most Malaysian newspapers carried the same agency photograph yesterday showing Malaysian firefighters battling to put out a peat fire in Indonesia, while an Indonesian soldier and policeman look on.
The message is clear: the Malaysians are not only suffering most from the smoke but are having to do Indonesia's work in putting the fires out (though some of the big plantations in Indonesia are owned by Malaysian companies).
The co-ordinating Minister for People's Welfare, Azwar Anas, said on Monday the freak weather phenomenon was partly to blame, and that it was a natural disaster which nobody could have prevented.
This prompted Singapore's leading newspaper to make a rare attack on Indonesia, complaining that the patience of Singaporeans and Malaysians was wearing thin.
"The cost of the haze is getting unacceptably high and it will get higher if not enough Indonesian officials act urgently, decisively," the pro-government Straits Times said.
Blaming the drought might be considered an act of self-delusion, said the paper. There was a haze every year from fires set by small farmers and plantation owners clearing land in the dry season.
But this year, the picture changed drastically. The pall has been thicker and lasted longer.
Reports have also appeared claiming that after the Indonesian government gave logging companies 15 days to stop setting fires, they responded by intensifying their efforts to burn off bush, undergrowth and unwanted trees by the deadline.
Indonesia has itself not suffered as much as Malaysia, but there, too, health concerns are mounting. The Health Minister, Mr Suyudi, said complaints of respiratory problems had increased threefold in some parts of the country as the number of micron particles in the air were 10 times safe levels. This affects breathing, and can cause lung infections, he warned.
The long-term effects are in health, economic, social and ecological areas, said Ravi Rajan, UN representative in Jakarta.
The situation was obviously a large-scale environmental emergency, said a UN official, Gerhard Putman-Cramer, head of a special disaster assessment team which arrived in Jakarta on Sunday.