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JILL JORDAN SIEDER

Special to the Jewish News

Dr. Rachel N
n and other
enters for Diseas
and Preventio

Atlanta
t was Friday, Sept. 14, three days after the
terrorist attacks that shook the
world. Dr. Rachel Nonkin
Avchen hurried to Georgia's
Dobbins Air Force Base to join three
dozen colleagues from Atlanta's
Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) on a C-130 cargo
plane bound for New York City.
The mission of her group of
Epidemiology Intelligence Service
(EIS) officers was not yet clear.
They might aid in a trauma recov-
ery operation if more survivors
emerged from the smoldering
Dr. Avchen
wreckage of the World Trade
Center. If the death toll were high, as feared,
they'd address other health concerns at the site.
Despite her haste, Avchen, 30, was deliberate
about the way she dressed that morning. After
putting on jeans and a sweatshirt for the cold
ride on the cargo plane, she took off her necklace
with the Hebrew chai (life) charm she usually

11

HARRY KERSBAUM
Staff Writer

Iv

hen anthrax
outbreaks
began last fall
in Florida,
Washington, D.C., and
New Jersey, Dr. Jeffrey Band
tested the protocol he
Dr. Band
helped put in place at
William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak for a

wore. Then she pinned on an American flag pin,
one she bought during the 1996 Olympics in
Atlanta, but had never worn.
"I'm not sure I was conscious at the time of
what I was doing," she recalled. "I guess I was
thinking, 'Do I really want to bring attention to
myself as a Jew right now?' which is odd because
it has never been something I've hidden.
"More than anything I was feeling very patriot-
ic. My country had been attacked, thousands of
people were hurt, and I was eager to do some-
thing about it."
As it turned out, survivors were few, so Avchen
helped New York public health officials track res-
cue workers' injuries. For three weeks, she did the
work while also absorbing the unrelenting evidence
of human pain and misery that pervaded the city.
She cried often, and prayed intensely
at times. She was sickened and angered
by the inhumanity of the terrorists,
and also by some of the anti-Semitic
and anti-Arab eruptions coming from
"stupid people across America."
High Holy Day services at a
Conservative synagogue in New York
City, led by a rabbi who had served as
a chaplain to the New York City Fire
Department, were the most emotional
and meaningful she ever attended.
"I was reading passages I've read my
entire life, and suddenly every line was
getting to me," Avchen said. "Some
will die by fire, you know . . . and history will
repeat itself, over and over again."
The swirl of impulses and emotions that
Avchen experienced following the Sept. 11
attacks mirrors the experience of a number of her
Jewish colleagues at the CDC's Atlanta headquar-

A

bio-terrorist outbreak.
Dr. Band, director of the division of infectious
diseases and international medicine at Beaumont,
used his past experience as head of the special
pathogens branch at Atlanta's Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) to put together a
policy for the hospital 13 months before the first
anthrax outbreak in Florida.
That hasn't been the case in other hospitals
around Michigan, he said. "The state is trying to
put together a standardized protocol at all institu-
tions, but that's still a work in progress," said Dr.

Band, who worked at the CDC from 1978-1981.
He calls his work of the CDC, and especially
with the Epidemiology Intelligence Service (EIS),
a great experience.
"Where else can you truly get the shoe leather
medical detective experience than a place like
CDC?" he said.
The EIS trains only 70 individuals a year Its
so different from going to a school of public
health where you're learning all about epidemiolo-
gy and outbreaks in a classroom," he said. "Here,
the world is the classroom." ❑

1/25
2002

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