Saturday, March 24, 2007
1st Annual Tuberculosis Awareness Walk at Grant Park, Atlanta, GA
I was thrilled to participate, along with 500-600 others, in an inspiring 1st Annual Tuberculosis Awareness Walk at Grant Park this morning in Atlanta. The walk was sponsored by the National TB Controller's Association, but was the brainchild of Vic Tomlinson, in CDC's Division of Tuberculosis Elimination. The approximately 2.5 mile walk around Grant Park was a local observance of World TB Day 2007 - always held on March 24 to commemorate the date when Robert Koch, in 1882, first announced the identification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis (TB) (MMWR). 
Dr. Ken Castro, USPHS Rear Admiral, and long-time Director of the Division of Tuberculosis Elimination, told me that Vic came to him about a year ago with the idea of a tuberculous awareness walk, and Ken told him to "go for it". According to the Division website, Vic Tomlinson started his public health career in 1970 as a TB case investigator for the Virginia Department of Health, and has been working on TB at State and Federal levels ever since then. Congratulations Vic! For me the highlight was when Regina Bess (shown here at the microphone), Vic's colleague in the Division, read a poem she composed about TB before the walk. I'm hoping to get a copy of the poem from Regina to include in this blog post.
Here's some more pictures I took this morning including a couple of Ken Castro, Vic Tomlinson, Kevin Fenton, and Julie Gerberding.
There were two great articles in yesterday's MMWR on TB. The first described progress and challenges with US and global control and elimination efforts and the other described the epidemiology of emerging drug resistant strains of M. tuberculosis.
Here's the link to theWHO 2007 Report Global TB Control.
This is the Global Plan to Stop TB 2006-2015 from the Stop TB Partnership
The advocacy organization Results had a prominent part in the pre-walk agenda this morning featuring a live call to a local Congressional Representative's voice mail! Results is devoted to: "Ending hunger and poverty through citizen action! Working in five areas: Healthy Families, Economic Opportunity, Education for All, Sustainable Development and Empowering Citizens, grassroots volunteers create the political will to end hunger and poverty in the U.S. and around the world."
This is a video from Results about how they work.
I also spent some time after the walk looking at the TB indicators for the Millineum Development Goals.
In May 2006, there was a summit to Stop Tuberculosis in the African-American Community.
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