‘Israel-trained medical team responded to Boston attack’

A top emergency medicine doctor at a Boston hospital where many of the wounded from Monday’s bombing attack were being treated credited Israel with training the hospital’s first-response team and readying it to deal with mass-casualty incidents.

While briefing media hours after the devastating attack that killed three people and wounded over 100 others near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, Dr. Alasdair Conn said that the scene of the carnage and the horrific injuries sustained by the victims were reminiscent of “a bomb explosion that we hear about in the news in Baghdad or Israel, or some other tragic place in the world.”

Afterward he added, “About two years ago, in actual fact, we asked the Israelis to come across, and they helped us set up our disaster team so that we could respond in this kind of manner.”

Conn, who is the chief of emergency services at Massachusetts General Hospital, reported that six of the victims taken to his hospital were in critical condition, requiring resuscitation, and five others were in serious condition.

He said that all of the patients he had seen from the attack were spectators rather than runners.