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Murmuring hearts echo across sacred Tibets mountains |
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21:30, October 22, 2008 |
The tranquil Yamdroyum Lake, together with the 7,260 meters Nojin Kansa Peak, in Langkazi County of southern Tibet presents more than breathtaking beauty for its significance in Tibetan Buddhism.
Monasteries and stone altars in the area, big or small, receive endless followers who came over, spinning their prayer wheels in hand while chanting scriptures in a murmured tone.
As pious as the old generation, Gaesang Yangzom, 11, reveres this vast land where the average altitude is around 4,500 meters. She takes for granted almost everything from the perennial thin air to the strong gale in winter.
One day, she cried. A medical team of pediatric cardiology experts from Beijing, Lhasa and Pittsburgh in the United States, diagnosed the Langkazi Wanquan Primary School pupil with congenital heart disease. Without proper treatment in time, doctors said, she could die of heart failure or endocarditis, a lethal complication triggered by bacteria infection.
During a two-day screening, seven of 995 children, from infants to 14 years, were found to be suffering serious congenital heart disease. Gaesang Yangzom was one of them. She will be sent to Beijing''s Anzhen Hospital for free open-heart surgery for simpler cardiac catherization treatment.
"Most children in Tibet with heart disease will die in childhood because of heart disease in high altitude," lamented Dr. Bradley B. Keller, the Pediatric Biomedical Innovation Development director at the Children''s Hospital of Pittsburgh. "They would live a normal and productive life if they were diagnosed at a young age because the catherization treatment takes only one hour and will change their lives fundamentally."
In his second trip to Tibet and the seventh screening since 2004, Keller and his Chinese alumna, Dr. Gu Hong who now leads the Pediatric Cardiology Department of Beijing''s An Zhen Hospital, made careful treatment arrangement for kids with heart murmurs who were the sickest to receive the earliest possible treatment with the least risk.
Field surveys targeting kindergartens and schools between 2005 and 2006 showed the prevalence of congenital heart disease in Tibet ranged from 12 per thousand to 14 per thousand, excluding deaths and illness at home. In plain areas, the proportion stood between six per thousand and eight per thousand.
Recognizing low oxygen as the "obvious reason" for the higher prevalence in Tibet, Gu said sanitation, nutrition, shortage of folic acid -- a key substance for heart development in the embryo -- and marriage between close relatives were also to be blamed.
The biggest obstacle to earlier screening of the disease, however, as Gu noted, was "low awareness" because local residents had become inured to the adverse living conditions and often took earlier symptoms such as breathing fast and hard as well as blue color, or cyanosis in medical terms, for granted.
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