We had another brown bag lunch today with a man named Stan Meiburg. He is currently a district director in the EPA and used to be the liason between the EPA and the CDC. He gave us a history of the EPA and explained some of the current issues facing the EPA. For a while, the discussion centered on the benefits of being regulation-based (unlike the CDC) but that this is a drawback in that they have a hard time developing incentive-based programs. These could potentially be more effective, but the… Continue

Out of the seven reports that are going to be finished in the next couple of week. I have made astounding progress on 5 of them by finishing, documented photographs, soils reports, multiple maps of the properties that describe (land elevations, photograph locations, existing improvements, etc), editing reports. There is a little bit more I need to learn before I have gone through everything one time. My next task that I am working on consists of editing Mineable Resource Investigation. This is a… Continue

Today was the first day of NEHA! My uniform is finally complete, so I started off my morning by driving to LTJG Cory Moore’s (a relatively new USPHS officer who runs the CLEH and SUPEH programs) house to make sure I had everything good to go. I was so lucky that she was willing to help me out because pretty much everything I had on was askew in some way or another. Cory has been a huge help to me with getting my uniform together and pretty much everything.
NEHA started with the keynote speaker w… Continue

Today I am currently documenting photographs of properties that we visited last week. When I was out in the field, I had a map that I used to mark a rough location of where each photograph was taken. I also utilized a map when I had to identify existing improvements on the land such as two-track ranch roads, 3-strand barb wire fences (abandoned or relatively new), local electric service power lines, natural gas line corridors, and other various items that are man made. Regarding photo location,… Continue

This is the first day I’ve been able to really dedicate my whole day to my project. I read and took notes on several papers and spent a lot of time on Google Scholar. Many articles have been written on Noro on cruise ships and in the hospital setting, but very few papers are out there specifically on shelter outbreaks, so it’s been interesting to figure out what is applicable and what is not. One paper was particularly interesting (although gross)—they purposely contaminated peoples’ hands with… Continue