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DIRECT FROM CDC ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH SERVICES BRANCH
Editor's Note: NERA strives to provide up-to-date and relevant information on environmental health and to build partnerships in the profession. In pursuit of these goals, we feature a column from the Environmental Health Services Branch (EHSB) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in every issue of the Journal.
In this column, EHSB and guest authors from across CDC will highlight a variety of concerns, opportunities, challenges, and successes that we all share in environmental public health. EHSB's objective is to strengthen the role of state, local, and national environmental health programs and professionals to anticipate, identify, and respond to adverse environmental exposures and the consequences of these exposures for human health. The services being developed through EHSB include access to topical, relevant, and scientific information; consultation; and assistance to environmental health specialists, sanitarians, and environmental health professionals and practitioners.
The conclusions in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of CDC.
Laura Green Brown is a behavioral scientist with EHSB. She helps the branch's Environmental Health Specialists Network (EHS-Net) with the design and implementation of restaurant food safety studies and analysis of data from those studies.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Environmental Health Specialists Network (EHS-Net) is a collaborative network focused on understanding factors that contribute to foodborne illness and improving environmental public health practice (see www.cdc.gov/nceh/ehs/ EHSNet/index.htm). EHS-Net includes environmental public health and food safety professionals from federal, state, and local public health organizations.
During the past 10 years, EHS-Net has conducted a number of studies on restaurant food safety. We have focused specifically on restaurants because they are an important source of foodborne illness outbreaks; half of all foodborne illness outbreaks are associated with restaurants (Lynch, Painter, Woodruff, & Braden, 2006). To better understand the environmental causes of restaurant-related foodborne illness outbreaks, and subsequently reduce or mitigate them, EHS-Net studies have been designed to investigate food preparation practices and other factors that could contribute to these types of outbreaks. Our studies have focused on topics that...