NEHA News from the
Journal of Environmental Health

• April 2008:  Epi-Ready Team Training Wins 2008 Food Safety Leadership Award from NSF International

• January/February 2008:  Jonathan Turner—Information Technology Specialist 

April 2008

Epi-Ready Team Training Wins 2008 Food Safety Leadership Award from NSF International

NSF International (NSF) announced that NEHA’s Epi-Ready Team Training is a 2008 recipient of the Food Safety Leadership Award in Education and Training. NSF’s Food Safety Leadership Awards program recognizes key individuals and organizations who have demonstrated outstanding leadership in foodservice safety. As part of its ongoing commitment to help protect the public from foodborne illness, each year NSF recognizes groundbreaking food safety achievements.

NEHA’s Epi-Ready Team Training workshop is a face-to-face training opportunity offered to environmental and other health professionals. The goal of this training is for all health professionals to work together in rapidly identifying and investigating a foodborne disease outbreak to allow for implementation of control measures that reduce the incidence of foodborne illness. The workshop includes lectures and interactive group exercises on passive surveillance, outbreak determination, environmental assessment, epidemiologic investigation, laboratory guidance, concluding actions, and food defense. To date, workshops have been conducted in 20 different locations and over 1,200 students in 46 states have been trained in the principles of outbreak investigation.

January/February 2008

Jonathan Turner—Information Technology Specialist

Editor’s note: Over the years, we have been featuring individual NEHA staff members in NEHA News so that you can get to know us a little better. This month, we highlight the staff member behind extension 338.

In April of 2007 I was interviewed for a position at NEHA that I thought would pose a challenge for me, offer a chance to spread my wings a little, and allow me to learn some new things. In the interview we talked about all the different kinds of things that I had done and the various tasks that my predecessor was involved with and the general tasks that the office staff would ask for help with, but I really had no idea what I was in for when I received the invitation to start the following Monday.

The bulk of my IT education and training took place in the little oil town of Houston, Texas. I had always been fascinated by computers and the magic that seemed to go on inside the computer shells, but I felt apprehensive about the mystery of how it worked. My first real hands-on experience came when I was volunteering with the Desktop Support Group while working in the Information Services Purchasing Department at Baker Hughes INTEQ. The Desktop Support people were willing to show me some things and taught me enough to feel comfortable with potentially making a career out of working with computers. I later moved on to a small education and support company that had contracts with various clients ranging from private residences to media conglomerates like Time Warner. With each successive assignment ranging from a simple software install to the more complex network connectivity issues, I experienced more and progressively learned more, gaining the confidence of my employers and the respect of my colleagues.

The first company where I really felt that I had found my niche was also the place where I gained the most knowledge about how desktops, networks, and servers worked together to serve the purposes of the people who used them. There were computers to build, software to install, printers to configure, phones to program, equipment to move, assets to track, troubleshooting to do, and friends to make. I worked with some fantastic people and supported some really interesting projects, like the Thunderhorse semi-submersible offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. As with all good things, however, it became time to move on to another adventure.

Too many months and a few temporary jobs later, I began work at the National Environmental Health Association as the IT specialist. The first week was uneventful mostly because Dawn Parks had told everyone in the office to leave me alone while I figured out how the network was configured, what server did what, where certain assets were located, and who everyone was. As with the jobs I’ve done before, the tasks could be learned only by doing. Thus far, I’ve learned how to create reports in Crystal Reports with the iMIS database; assemble the documents for the 2007 Annual Educational Conference CD, including an opening splash-page menu; administer the servers running Windows 2003 for Small Business; and undertake a host of other projects. I had been told that there would be many opportunities to learn, and I was not disappointed.

When I am not thinking about how to create that new report in Crystal or figuring out why e-mail isn’t working right, I spend the bulk of my time at home in Parker, Colorado, with my wife, Misty, and my four children, who are 10, 8, 4, and 2 years old. There is a lot to do around the house, and the kids always have something going on, but we somehow find the time to take care of everyone’s needs.

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