Tuberculosis

In 1995 APHL (then know as the Association of State and Territorial Public Health Laboratory Directors) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed and published Mycobacterium tuberculosis:  Assessing Your Laboratory, a tool designed to assist laboratories in the assessment of the quality of their laboratory’s TB diagnostic practices.  This year APHL members and staff, in conjunction with CDC, clinical and commercial laboratorians have updated the content of the original tool to reflect the profound changes to TB diagnostics in the ensuing years.  The content has been converted to the electronic tool that you are able to access here.

The Laboratory Upgrade Component of the TB Cooperative Agreement began in 1992 with the primary purpose of facilitating improvements in TB laboratory performance. A particular sum of money (currently about $7.7 million) is distributed between 68 state, territory, and local public health laboratories and that distribution is based on a predetermined (by CDC) Funding Formula. In the past, that formula was not well understood by most grant recipients. In 2008 CDC convened a workgroup tasked with developing consensus-based recommendations for a new formula to be used for the Cooperate Agreements for FY2010-2014. This webpage contains various documents that explain the funding formula in detail as well as resources aimed at making the application process a bit easier.

​In response to a 2002 Federal TB Taskforce recomendation, APHL and CDC conducted the National TB Laboratory Services Survey.  The survey's major objective was to assess the capability and capacity of commercial, clinical and public health laboratories in the US to provide TB diagnostic testing services.