Norovirus, Emergency Response, EPA, and the Beatles on Pandora

[Samantha Kantrowitz]

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 legislative appropriations often allow them to only do their exact job (to enforce RCRA, TSCA, etc.) and not get particularly creative about it. We also talked about how the EPA’s power is fairly limited when it comes to climate change—because nobody envisioned it as a problem when the EPA was founded, their powers don’t clearly give them the ability to regulate greenhouse gases like CO2. That definitely put a new spin on it for me. So much of the time, the media and public in general make it sound like “oh the government is slacking on climate change,” and while that may be true in some respects, there are reasons for that that you don’t necessarily see at first glance.
Also, the SUPEH interns (and Katelyn, another intern in the EHSB) had a meeting with CAPT Miller today. We will be doing a very abbreviated Environmental Health Training in Emergency Response (EHTER) course for the CLEH interns in a couple of weeks. We are going to focus on shelters, which seems to be my new specialty, and lead the group in table-top exercises. My section is going to be on re-entry—evaluating what needs to be done before residents can go back to their home to evaluate the situation or collect belongings and what needs to be done before they can move back permanently. The slides are made for me all ready because of the EHTER course, but it will be challenging and fun to actually teach the material. Maybe my o-chem tutoring skills will come in handy!
I was able to spend the rest of my day working on my project. I discovered this morning that the secret to productivity is working on my personal laptop with public access WiFi along with my CDC network keyfob in the cafeteria atrium. This set-up gives me windows to look at outside, quiet, and the Beatles on Pandora as background music. Brilliant.
But anyway, I was able to get a lot of work done on my project and add most of the information on cleaning methods specific to areas that may be in shelters. Bathrooms are a central focus for sanitation for obvious reasons (where do people go when they have acute gastrointestinal symptoms?) I sent the version as far as I had this morning to CAPT Miller, and he was able to read it by the afternoon. He was really happy with the way it turned out, saying something about being one of the best presentations he’s ever seen and maybe having me adapt it to include in the EHTER course when I’m done with it. I was really proud that he was happy with it and think it would be awesome if my work really ended up in the training program. Hopefully janitors and shelter managers will use it, but it would be even better if environmental health professionals could get information from it as well!