Specialists in emergency, internal, natural and sports medicine from the UNM Medical School will be offering free "mini med-school" sessions beginning Tuesday.
Session topics include: "Response to Terrorism," "Get the Skinny on Fat," "Shape Up" and "Natural Medicine."
The UNM Continuing Education Division and the Health Sciences Center will sponsor the sessions every Tuesday in February from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the UNM Continuing Education Conference Center, 1634 University Blvd. NE.
"I hope to see people getting the best that the Health Sciences Center has to offer," said Dr. Ellen Cosgrove, professor of medicine and associate dean of Continuing Medical Education, in a statement.
Dr. Paul Roth, dean of the UNM Medical School and an emergency medicine professor will be one of the speakers at Tuesday's session, "Response to Terrorism." Roth was on the Disaster Medicine Assistance Team that went to New York after the World Trade Center attack. He has been on emergency teams that have provided disaster relief in the aftermath of hurricanes and earthquakes but found the effort in New York to be an intense and profound experience.
"The issues are not natural disasters anymore," he said in an interview. "We're more concerned about man-made disasters that are the result of terrorist attacks."
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Roth said the Disaster Medicine Team at the UNM Medical School has prepared for scenarios involving chemical attacks and radioactive material. Still, he said he finds the threat of biological attacks to be the scariest scenario.
"The greatest fear that we have is that there would be organisms that were genetically altered," Roth said. "We have faculty here working with a number of agencies on ways to identify organisms quickly and develop new vaccines quickly."
He said that UNM has a Bio-defense program where scientists and doctors work with health agencies and disaster teams to look at ways to better respond to terrorist attacks. Effective response from disaster teams to chemical and biological attacks is driven by a rapid detection of the problem, he said.
John Gaffney, director of the Emergency Management Division of the UNM Health Sciences Center, is also a scheduled speaker for Tuesday's session. He was on Disaster Medicine Assistance Teams that went to the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. He said he works full-time on preparedness issues - for his own institution as well as at multiple other levels with other agencies. Gaffney said his deployments to the Pentagon and the World Trade Center didn't affect his opinion about the state of New Mexico's readiness for terrorist attacks.
He said while he didn't want to portray any sense of over-confidence, he felt that most of the big pieces were in place in New Mexico. He added that he was anxious to pull the pieces together to have a complete system.
