UNM physician helping coordinate California burn victims

As wildfires rage in California, a physician at the University of New Mexico is helping coordinate the care for burn victims.

Dr. Sharmila Dissanaike is the chair of the Department of Surgery at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and president of the American Burn Association. Dissanaiki, in her role as association president, is keeping close tabs on verified burn centers to make sure that any burn patients are swiftly delivered to a capable facility. It’s a crucial responsibility, as treating a burn quickly can be the difference between life and death.

“If you have a major burn — someone in a wildfire could easily be burned over more than half their body with smoke inhalation — if that person does not get to a verified burn center within a few hours, their death rate from that injury goes up for every hour there is in getting them to the right level of care,” she said in an interview with the Journal.

Dissanaiki checked on burn center data Thursday. She said there are nine burn centers in California relatively close to the fires and the centers were so far able to handle burn victims — there were two burn patients requiring the Intensive Care Unit at one point during the day. She said she was told by officials on the ground the burn centers hadn’t been overwhelmed because the local population overwhelmingly heeded evacuation orders.

There were several major wildfires raging in Southern California on Thursday. At least seven people have been killed and thousands of structures were burned.

Some states that are prone to wildfires, like California, have a high number of verified burn centers. Other states do not.

There are 78 verified burn centers across the country — none in New Mexico — which Dissanaike said is not enough.

“A very bad burn is probably going to be the sickest patient in the hospital. It creates a huge metabolic stress in the body, and so those patients are incredibly sick, and then when you add smoke inhalation as often happens in wildfires and similar incidents, that patient really needs incredibly high resources,” she said. “They need critical care for the first few days, and then they need intensive surgery and a very prolonged recovery.”

As president of the burn association, Dissanaike is worried that climate change will increase the frequency of wildfires and burn victims before the U.S. builds more specialized facilities to treat patients. She said there is clear data that in the last five years there were significantly more wildfires and wildfire injuries than in the five years before that.

“This is what worries me as ABA president, that we’re not adequately ramping up our capacity across the country, because it’s one thing for this to happen in a state that’s relatively well-equipped to deal with it,” she said. “But if we do not shore up these resources in multiple parts of the country, we are going to come to a situation where there is a major incident and patients are harmed because there are delays in getting them to the right level of care.”

Dissanaike is one of several New Mexico residents who are assisting wildfire efforts. Several Albuquerque and Bernalillo County firefighters, as well as some from other parts of the state, were dispatched to California on Thursday to help control the blazes.

The burn association has a disaster hotline and a watch board, where Dissanaiki and others can monitor how crowded burn centers are.

The work has been needed recently.

On New Year’s Eve, a fireworks explosion in Hawaii overwhelmed the state’s burn centers and some patients had to be transferred to the mainland, she said.

“Having the watch board, having accurate bed counts, and having this communication facilitated by the ABA led to some of those patients being transferred to Arizona,” she said. “The burn center was able and willing ... to accept those patients. And that went very smoothly, and obviously was the best thing for those patients.”