The serious health implications raised in two recent letters under the heading Unavoidable Reality Of Street Pollution (March 23) were precisely mirrored in a Press Association article on page 24 of the same issue of The Times (Poor Air Quality Causing Early Deaths Of 50,000 A Year In UK).

In this article, the UK Commons Environment Audit Committee is reported to have said that poor air quality was contributing to conditions such as asthma, heart disease and cancer in the UK and that failure to reduce levels of pollution translated into enormous health costs to the National Health Service.

As in the letters by George Debono and Albert Bezzina referred to above, the Audit committee called on the government to give air quality higher priority.

The committee chairman, Tim Yeo, said that air pollution caused more deaths than passive smoking, traffic accidents and obesity put together - yet pollution received very little attention from the government or the media.

All this has a familiar ring to many people living in highly-urbanised areas in Malta, most of whom are exposed to heavy pollution.

Surely this is, at the very least, a matter for our Health Promotion Department to take up. This department had dealt very competently with tobacco smoking by introducing a smoking ban in enclosed public places. Now it is time for the health threat from our polluted air to be put high on the agenda.