Beijing, August 18 – A majority of the six to seven million Han Chinese who have migrated to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau suffer from altitude sickness than their Tibetan counterparts, a Chinese expert said.
The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, known as the “roof of the world,” is an area with high altitude and thin oxygen. It has complicated natural conditions including glacier, desert, plateau and grassland.
Living in the region for thousand of years, Tibetans have proven to be the best ethnic group adaptable to tableland life, Xinhua news agency quoted Wu Tianyi, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and director of the state laboratory on plateau medical science.
Tianyi said an estimated six million or seven million Han people from other parts of China also live on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.
“Though they have accustomed to the life on tableland, the Han people’s incidence of the mountain sickness is 70 per cent higher than the Tibetans’,” he said at the Sixth International Altitude Disease Conference in Xining, capital of Qinghai province in southwest China.
The report said experts considered the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in south-western China to be a desirable natural laboratory for the study of altitude disease.
As many plants exists in areas with an altitude of 4,000-5,000 metres, they are the raw materials for making drugs for mountain sickness treatment and prevention, the report said.
