Over three years spent delivering PACs, already having saved seven lives
Taiwan News
Date: 2019/01/06
By: George Liao, Taiwan News, Staff Writer
(photo courtesy of Wang Shih-hao) (By Central News Agency)
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – A group of Taiwanese mountain enthusiasts spent three and a half years to complete a mission to carry portable altitude chambers (PACs) to dozens of mountain huts and high-altitude attractions to save lives. The mission was initiated by an emergency-room physician who, with his classmates, encountered a mountaineering accident when he was a college student, and their lives were saved by a rescue operation, according to a Central News Agency report on Sunday.
Wang Shih-hao (王士豪) was the president of his college’s mountaineering club in 1999, when he and four other club members went on a trip to climb Cilai Mountain (奇萊山), which is over 3,500 meters in height, the report said. However, they encountered a snowstorm and were trapped on the mountain. They asked for help and were successfully rescued by a helicopter.
After he came down from the mountain, his father told him, “Your life was saved by the country, so when you have a chance, you should give back to society,” CNA reported.
Driven by his passion for mountaineering, Wang began to devote himself to the study and research of alpine medicine in 2006. After one year’s field investigation, he found that the occurrence rate of altitude sickness was as high as 36%, meaning that one out of every three mountaineers had experienced altitude sickness, CNA reported.
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