Letter from the President
CTCA is one of the largest and most active TB Controllers associations in the U.S. Our membership is made up of TB Controllers, public health doctors, nurses and allied health professionals working in TB Control throughout California.
Our biggest contributions to California TB Control are demonstrated here on this website. CTCA produces and updates TB control guidelines, and advocates for TB control in a variety of ways as evidenced by the committees and workgroups that CTCA has formed. CTCA staff and volunteers bring together public health professionals working in TB from all over the state once a year for our annual spring conference. In February, we held our annual conference in San Diego titled TB - A Disease Without Borders: The California Experience, in conjunction with the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, North American Region (IUATLD-NAR.) The California TB control community had the opportunity to connect and collaborate with TB workers from all over North America. We are gearing up for our next annual conference, to be held April 30-May 1, 2009 in San Francisco. Check out our conferences page for details.
CTCA volunteers are hard at work revising some key guidelines that direct our work in California. We recently posted the new Renal Dialysis Guidelines, and we expect newly revised Contact Investigation Guidelines to be released within a few months. We also have workgroups working on Directly Observed Therapy Guidelines, Oversees Screening guidelines, and Infectiousness Guidelines. All of our Guidelines are linked from our guidelines page.
CTCA’s education committee recently launched a new best practice project right here on this website: Best Practices in TB Control. CTCA encourages submissions to build this project; we hope this resource will be widely utilized by the California TB Control community.
Many in the California TB control community are feeling the effects of looming budget cuts. Recently, CTCA Executive Committee members took action by collecting impact statements from local health jurisdictions and informed Governor Schwarzenegger and the entire California legislature with a letter demonstrating that cuts to TB control programs will be disastrous to the public health. In the coming months, CTCA will continue to take an active stance to put TB control at the forefront of state and federal legislators.
We welcome and encourage TB Control staff to get involved with CTCA by joining one of our many committees or workgroups. Feel free to contact us to bring other issues to our attention. With increased collaboration and leadership, we are ever striving to accomplish our mission: to eliminate the threat of tuberculosis from California.
CTCA President
While the California Tuberculosis Controllers Association is unified in the mission of eliminating TB, we cannot offer advice about individual cases and have no authority over local Public Health Departments. All case related inquiries should be made to local TB Control Programs.
For a list of California local health departments, click here.