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OUTREACH
Medical Team Aids Earthquake Relief in IranNo members of the International Medical Surgical Response Team (IMSuRT) thought their winter holiday would involve a voyage halfway around the world. But when a 6.6-magnitude earthquake struck Bam, Iran, on Dec. 26, Susan Briggs, IMSuRT's supervising medical officer, and her team were deployed less than a day later.
Fifty-eight members of the International Medical Response Team traveled to Bam, Iran, where a 6.6-magnitude earthquake struck on Dec. 26. Briggs, associate director of trauma service at Massachusetts General Hospital and HMS associate professor of surgery at the hospital, heads the team of 140 trauma specialists, surgeons, anesthesiologists, respiratory therapists, biomedical engineers, paramedics, and nurses. Combined, they are the first rapidly deployable expert team equipped to establish a fully capable free-standing field surgical facility anywhere in the world. IMSuRT was created by Briggs at the request of the U.S. State Department following the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. About 100 members of the team work at Harvard affiliates, and 58 of them made the journey to Bam. "When I heard they were considering sending us to Iran, I didn't think we would be allowed in," said Briggs. Her team was the first to enter the country in an official U.S. government capacity since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. "You couldn't set up in the center of town," explained Briggs. "Seventy percent of it was destroyed." The earthquake claimed an estimated 30,000 lives and injured approximately 20,000 people. Because of Iranian cultural traditions, IMSuRT had to improvise its standard setup and create separate treatment facilities for men and women rather than the usual acute and non-acute designations. Iranian women could only be treated by women, and all women in public were expected to have their heads covered. "We had brought wool caps, but it got too hot to wear them during the day," Briggs said, "so we cut arm slings to use as hats." IMSuRT treated 727 patients, performed seven operations, and had six live births (two by Cesarean) in their 12-day stint in the field hospital. One of the babies was born prematurely at 32 weeks and was hand-ventilated for 10 hours by respiratory therapists until it could be med-flighted to Tehran for further treatment. "We saw all kinds of injuries, including a lot of pulmonary problems because of all the dust," said Briggs, whose humanitarian medical relief work took her to Turkey following its 1999 earthquake. Interpreters translated Farsi for IMSuRT, but it was a combination of the language barrier and the devastation the Iranian people had faced that was most difficult for Briggs. "Some of them lost 20 to 40 family members because extended families lived together. The language barrier made medical care and emotional support difficult to give." Critical specialists, including Briggs, stayed in the field hospital around the clock. "We slept on the floor of the operating room and rotated people between tents in 12-hour shifts," she said. Before they left on Jan. 7, IMSuRT donated their entire hospital to the Islamic Red Cross. "The most rewarding part was to see that politics was put aside to let us fulfill a need," Briggs said. Briggs will be speaking about her experiences Feb. 9 at 5:30 p.m. in the Carl Walter Amphitheater, TMEC, as part of the Cabot Primary Care series. Please RSVP to the HMS Primary Care Division at 617-509-9803. --Leah Gourley |
