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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, tribal, 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 conclusions in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of CDC.
Lisa McCormick is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health (UAB SOPH) and has been working with the South Central Partnership for Workforce Development since 2002. Jesse Pevear is a statistician and works with the Survey Research Unit at UAB SOPH.
In 2007, the University of Alabama at Birmingham's (UAB) School of Public Health (SOPH), the Jefferson County (Alabama) Department of Health (JCDH)> NEHA, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Environmental Health (CDC/NCEH) partnered to begin development of a comprehensive online package of courses for environmental public health (EPH) practitioners. This series of courses, known as the Environmental Public Health Online Courses (EPHOC), was developed in response to the 2005 National Profile of Local Health Departments (National Association of County and City Health Officials, 2007), which indicated that many local health departments suffer from a lack of basic workforce development infrastructure, insufficient...