TB IN THE NEWS


​TB Articles:


TB Incidence Reports:

Read lots more TB news on our website page  ‘From TB Wire’!

DC UPDATE
Thank you to everyone who supported the TB Survivors’ Hill Day on March 14th! This was the first of two TB Hill Days, where TB survivors and other experts will be making in-person visits with their Members of Congress. Get ready for the April 15th TB Hill Day!

Continue to ask your Members of Representatives and Senators to co-sponsor the End TB Now Act, H.1776/S.288!! Here’s a helpful fact sheet and a press release about the End TB Now Act.

Additional calls to action include:

  1. We need to urge our members of Congress to include a minimum of $225 million for CDC’s FY2025 TB programs, all of which were hard-hit by COVID-19’s aftermath.
  2. Would the Senator/Representative write a letter to CMS Administrator Brooks-LaSure in support of a National Coverage Determination of LTBI screening and testing?


Call the Capitol Switchboard at 1-202-224-3121 and ask for your senator/representative or give your state if you do not know their name. When you are connected to an office, ask for the Health Legislative Assistant. If you leave a voicemail message, include your name, phone number, and email so that they can respond.

Sample message using two of our key requests:

I am a constituent from [your town] and I am calling to urge Sen./Rep.______ to co-sponsor the End Tuberculosis Now Act of 2023, S.288/H.R.1776, which has passed through committee and just needs leadership to bring it to the floor. The bill outlines a plan and critical actions to align tuberculosis efforts in the U.S. with international efforts. TB, an airborne infectious disease, is once again the leading global infectious disease killer. [Add a sentence about why you personally care about TB elimination.] Would the Senator/Representative please co-sponsor this bill? Secondly, I am very concerned that the US just suffered a 16% increase in TB cases, largely due to COVID-19 pandemic’s aftermath! The only way to make up lost ground is to strengthen our public health infrastructure, especially the TB Division at the CDC. Would the Senator/Representative also speak to Leadership in favor of $225 million for the TB Division at the CDC?

[Bonus points if you write us at leadership@stoptbusa.org and tell us how your call went!!]



TB REPORTS & RESOURCES

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Find more TB resources on our website page ‘TB Resources’!​

TB Wire past issues: 2024, 2023, 2022 

Stop TB USA
stoptbusa.org
leadership@stoptbusa.org
PO Box 260288, Atlanta, GA 31126 USA

​​​​​Stop TB USA: Where we unite to #EndTB!

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​Consider donating: Make a check out to NTCA (our fiscal home) with “Stop TB USA donation” in the memo line.

Send to PO Box 260288, Atlanta, GA 31126

​​​EVENTS, CONFERENCES, & COURSES  


April 2024


GREETINGS FROM THE CHAIR
​
Many of you have seen the 2023 preliminary TB numbers from the CDC – there's been a 16% increase in TB cases and a 15% increase in the case rate compared to 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic and fallout set
us back a full decade, so we need more voices to#EndTB! But you can help: for our April 15 TB Hill Day, you can join TB Survivors and other experts in Washington, DC--be it in person, or by calling Members of
Congress that day in solidarity (see the DC Update section for our messages). This event happens
on the eve of the co-located annual meetings of the IUATLD-North American Region and the National TB Conference in Baltimore, April 16-19. Top researchers, clinicians, and advocates including TB survivors and Maria Smilios, author of The Black Angels, will all be there!

#TBElimination is a big goal, so won’t you #DreamBigwith us?

- Cynthia A. Tschampl, PhD​

ANNOUNCEMENTS

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Opportunities:

programs.
-FDA updated its Drug Shortage Reportto include isoniazid (INH)on 05/23/23.View the report here.2023-2024 TEA Mini-Grant Program RFP and Information Session Open Now!Applications dueJune 16th, 2023.
-CDC recently published a“Dear Colleague Letter”addressing reported drug shortage challenges for U.S. TB
programs.
-FDA updated its Drug Shortage Reportto include isoniazid (INH)on 05/23/23.View the report here.2023-2024 TEA Mini-Grant Program RFP and Information Session Open Now!Applications dueJune 16th, 2023.
-CDC recently published a“Dear Colleague Letter”addressing reported drug shortage challenges for U.S. TB
programs.
-FDA updated its Drug Shortage Reportto include isoniazid (INH)on 05/23/23.View the report here.2023-2024 TEA Mini-Grant Program RFP and Information Session Open Now!Applications dueJune 16th, 2023.
-CDC recently published a“Dear Colleague Letter”addressing reported drug shortage challenges for U.S. TB
programs.
-FDA updated its Drug Shortage Reportto include isoniazid (INH)on 05/23/23.View the report here.

2023-2024 TEA Mini-Grant Program RFP and Information Session Open Now!Applications dueJune 16th, 2023.
-CDC recently published a“Dear Colleague Letter”addressing reported drug shortage challenges for U.S. TB
programs.
-FDA updated its Drug Shortage Reportto include isoniazid (INH)on 05/23/23.View the report here.2023-2024 TEA Mini-Grant Program RFP and Information Session Open Now!Applications dueJune 16th, 2023.
-CDC recently published a“Dear Colleague Letter”addressing reported drug shortage challenges for U.S. TB
programs.
-FDA updated its Drug Shortage Reportto include isoniazid (INH)on 05/23/23.View the report here.

JOURNAL ARTICLES

​​Discover many more peer-reviewed articles on our website page ‘Peer-Reviewed Publications’ !

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TB BOOKSHELF

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Breathing Room by Marsha Hayles
ISBN:  9781466816039
















Tuberculosis was once so prevalent in the Western (i.e. European and North American) consciousness that its appearance in literature could not be the narrative’s primary element: rather it served as a plot device (to keep characters bedridden or as an alternate means of disposal than “brain fever”) or as a metaphor–consider the afflicted in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Hugo’s Les Miserables or the entirety of Mann’s pre-WWI epic, The Magic Mountain.

Marsha Hayles pre-teen novel Breathing Room (2012) tasks itself with educating the reader while maintaining its focus on its protagonist, Evvy Hoffmeister, a 13-year-old girl being treated at the Loon Lake Sanitorium, in 1940. 


Anyone involved in TB-advocacy in the U.S. knows the challenge of convincing people that tuberculosis is a disease of the present as well as the past. But there’s a vibrancy to the book that keeps it from being simply a YA version of The Magic Mountain set just before another world war (its looming presence given force via Sarah, who is Jewish –but don’t tell anyone!--,Evvy’s closest friend at the sanatorium. Even when physically quiet and motionless–as prescribed–Evvy is not a passive observer of the power struggles among staff members patients. Good children’s and YA novels need not demand their leads to mature, but they must discover and explore. And what Evvy gains, along with the reader, are new perspectives. This sense of discovery parallels the author’s own journey writing the book as detailed in Hayles “Author’s Notes” and notes on the images. And this discovery ensures that while this is a novel of the past, it is not the past–something Hayles conveys in Evvy’s grief over the dead: there’s a sense that those deaths might have been unavoidable, but deaths from TB are simply wrong. And the fact that TB is now treatable gives Breathing Room added value for a modern audience, particularly readers of this newsletter wishing to explain why we’re here and what we’re doing, to the younger generations. 


- David Moskowitz, Stop TB USA Media Work Group Chair
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