EHS Spotlight: Drought Document; HIAs, Plain Language Summaries

New EHS Spotlight Features:

Protecting Public Health During Drought;

Establishing the Practice of HIAs in the U.S.;

EHS-Net Plain Language Summaries;

Draft Pool Module for Comment (Lifeguarding + Bather Supervision)

When Every Drop Counts: Protecting Public Health During Drought Conditions—A Guide for Public Health Professionals – This document includes information about how drought affects public health, recommends steps to help mitigate the health effects of drought, identifies future needs for research and other drought-related activities, and provides a list of helpful resources and tools.

Establishing the Practice of Health Impact Assessment (HIA) in the United States – Guest columnist CDR Arthur M. Wendel describes HIAs as well as tools and resources to help EH practitioners engage in HIAs. This article is published in the July/August 2012 issue of the Journal of Environmental Health. 

EHS-Net Plain Language Summaries – No time to read journal articles detailing EHS-Net findings? Summaries of 12 EHS-Net studies are now available in four categories:

• Restaurant-related foodborne illness outbreaks.
• General public's beliefs about gastrointestinal illness.
• Restaurant food handling and food safety practices.
• Retail food safety programs.

EHS-Net (the Environmental Health Specialists Network) works to identify and prevent environmental factors contributing to foodborne and waterborne illness outbreaks.

Draft Lifeguarding and Bather Supervision Module for Public Comment – The comment period for this module has been extended to September 30, 2012. The draft module is part of the Model Aquatic Health Code now under development.

This module is a first step toward improving the consistency in training, lifeguard management and supervision, lifeguard competency for guarded facilities, and proper bather supervision at unguarded facilities. The module contains requirements for unguarded and guarded aquatic facilities, general requirements for lifeguard training, and more.