Mass. Iran quake team expects no call for Asia
Exactly a year ago, Dr. Susan Briggs led a team of specialists in disaster medicine from Massachusetts General Hospital and other Bay State medical centers into the rubble of Bam, the Iranian city decimated by a massive earthquake.
Briggs and other members of her squad, known as the International Medical Surgical Response Team, were hailed for saving lives in Iran, but they have not been dispatched by the US government to help survivors of this week's Indian Ocean quake and tsunami. Nor do they expect any calls.
"My guess is no," Briggs said yesterday. "In the Bam earthquake, the entire medical infrastructure was destroyed. Nothing was there."
South Asia is different. While the devastation along swaths of coastline in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, and India is immense, the hospitals and clinics remain intact in larger cities in those nations, with plenty of specialists ready to help.
And the scope of injuries, Briggs said, appears to be vastly different. In the temblor that leveled Bam, thousands of people were buried alive under collapsed buildings. But with this week's tsunami waves, death was more often swift and certain, said Dr. Don Desilva, a native of Sri Lanka and director of neurosurgical and orthopedic anesthesia at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Thus, Desilva said, the most pressing need is not medical personnel but supplies to replace what has been swept out to sea. That's why he arranged to have about 40 boxes of surplus syringes, examining gloves, and other medical equipment from Beth Israel Deaconess ferried by air to his homeland yesterday.
The founder of another widely deployed disaster response unit, Dr. Richard V. Aghababian of UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, said that, like Briggs, he does not expect his Disaster Medical Assistance Team to be summoned.
"With the magnitude of this disaster, the real issue is will they have enough products like antibiotics to treat infections, materials for bandaging injuries, and orthopedic equipment to stabilize fractures," said Aghababian, emergency medicine chief at UMass Memorial and now a senior member of the disaster team. "Given all of that, it would seem to me the greatest need right now would not be personnel from America, which would cost a fortune to send around the world when indigenous medical personnel can provide those services quite well."
Briggs said her unit, which tended to 800 earthquake victims during 12 days in Iran, springs into action when called by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That agency, in turn, takes its cues from the US Department of State, which as of yesterday had made no request for medical personnel to be sent to Asia, FEMA spokesman Marty Bahamonde said.
A State Department spokesman said that a half-dozen Asian and African nations have sought US or international assistance with tsunami recovery and that Washington is evaluating how best to respond to those pleas for help.
The Massachusetts doctors said international aid agencies should continue to focus on providing clean water and resources for sewage treatment to areas awash in sea water and water contaminated with human waste.
Stephen Smith can be reached at stsmith@globe.com.
