By Matthew E. Milliken
mmilliken@heraldsun.com; 419-6684
DURHAM -- A few hours after Haiti was struck by a catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake, the head of Duke University Health System sent a message.
Find a way to help, Victor Dzau told his staff.
They have. On Friday, a Duke-sponsored mission of mercy will wing its way to the Caribbean nation wounded by last month's 7.0-magnitude quake.
The 14-person team of Duke doctors and nurses will fly by chartered jet to the capital, Port-au-Prince. Their destination is a hospital in Cange, about two hours away. The team will relieve a group from the University of Pennsylvania, who will spend some time Saturday briefing their replacements before departing.
The group was outfitted Wednesday with blue Duke baseball caps and gray T-shirts emblazoned on the back with the letters DMTF-1, for Duke Medicine Task Force. The team will also bring several boxes of supplies, many of them to aid with complex wound care.
The 120-bed Haitian-run hospital where the team will labor for 10 to 14 days is affiliated with Partners in Health, a global organization run by Paul Farmer, a Duke graduate and trustee. Duke employees have been coordinating with Farmer's organization to fine-tune the skills and supplies that the team will bring on its relief mission.
Most of the group assembled in an executive conference room Wednesday for a briefing by April Perry, a Duke nurse who returned Friday from a 10-day aid mission to Haiti. Afterward, Dzau told the team: "... I don't know how to thank you. It's wonderful."
Ian Greenwald, the task force chief, is an emergency room physician and Army reservist. He joined Duke six months ago as its chief medical officer for disaster preparedness and response. While he has experience as a combat medic, this will be his first humanitarian aid mission.
The team is keenly aware of the need to tailor their treatments to a developing nation that has suffered great damage, Greenwald said. Some complex therapies that would work in North Carolina won't in Haiti.
"I think the challenge for us is, given the magnitude of this event, determining how we can help in a concrete fashion and how we can try to minimize the morbidity and mortality associated with horrific injuries and get as many people as possible back to a functional status that is as high as possible," Greenwald said.
Cameron Wolfe, 33, is an infectious disease specialist. He's been studying illnesses that he may encounter in Haiti, such as tetanus and cholera, that rarely if ever appear in industrialized nations.
Wolfe, an Australian by birth, has worked in East Timor, Ethiopia and Rwanda, although never in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.
"I think that will be a huge challenge, to take yourself out of the normal supportive hospital infrastructure that you get used to here and try and [work] in a situation where that is not there," Wolfe said. "So I hope my clinical training and theoretical knowledge holds up in the face of it. It probably gets tested more in this sort of situation."
Mark Shapiro, a 42-year-old trauma surgeon, is another team member. He has a 4-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter with his wife, Jennifer, an engineer. "She is very, very supportive," Shapiro said. "And if you read between the lines, she's scared, she's nervous, she's concerned -- but she is supportive."
Shapiro, when asked about his own concerns about the trip, gave a striking answer.
"Every time you operate on somebody, you bond with their soul," he said. "And I know that's corny and stuff like that, but I'm concerned [that] there'll be a piece of me that I'll leave on the island with some of these folks and it'll be very difficult to leave that behind."
