By Duke Medicine News and Communications

Durham, N.C. -- Duke Medicine has established a web log or "blog" that will allow its medical relief teams to provide direct updates from the hurricane disaster area. The site will also provide a place for the Duke community – including faculty, staff and family members -- to post messages of encouragement.

The blog is available at dukemedteams.blogspot.com.

Two teams of doctors, nurses, and other clinicians from Duke are helping to staff field hospitals in Mississippi: one in Bay St. Louis and the other in Meridian.

"We are working triage and helping with a variety of minor injuries (cuts, scrapes, bruising)," wrote Duke team member Larry Tucker, R.N., in the first blog posting Tuesday. "It was frustrating at first to deal with the confusion and swapping of locations, but now that they are finally set up and seeing patients, spirits are quite high. Everyone really kicked it into gear on Sunday once they were set up and running. We treated over 100 patients yesterday."

Tucker is one of five nurses and technicians from Duke University Hospital and Durham Regional Hospital who arrived in Bay St. Louis on Sunday as part of the Duke Regional Advisory Committee's State Medical Assistance Team (SMAT). The group is part of a larger team drawn from hospitals and EMS agencies across North Carolina that was dispatched to the disaster area Friday night to establish a 100-bed mobile hospital.

A second group of 23 Duke clinicians flew to Meridian Tuesday. Organized by the National Institutes of Health, the Meridian field hospital has the ability to treat adult and pediatric patients with a variety of medical problems. The team includes specialists in emergency medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, surgery, cardiology and obstetrics and gynecology.