CEPAR Sends Emergency Medical Team to Pakistan

Johns Hopkins Medicine
Office of Corporate Communications
Media contact: Gary Stephenson
410-955-5384; [email protected]
October 19, 2005

MEDIA ADVISORY

CEPAR Sends Emergency Medical Team to Pakistan

At the request of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response (CEPAR) and Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Refugee and Disaster Response have sent a team of two physicians and a nurse to Pakistan to assess long-term health needs and provide clinical care in the wake of the devastating earthquake there.

Italo Subbaro, M.D., and Angali Pant, M.D., both on the faculty of the Bloomberg School, as well as fellows in Hopkins Department of Emergency Medicine, and Daksha Brambhatt, a nurse in the department, left on Monday for Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, with a contingent of medical personnel assembled by the IRC for a month-long mission to the stricken region. Muzaffarabad is the capital of the state of Azad Kashmir, part of the Pakistani-controlled portion of the Kashmir region.  It is located very close to the epicenter of the Oct. 8 earthquake, which destroyed 50 percent of the buildings in the town (including most official buildings) and is estimated to have killed up to 40,000 people in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir alone.