Project Juntos   

The border between the United States and Mexico is more than 2,000 miles long. From a public health perspective, the U.S.-Mexico border should be conceived as a single epidemiological unit in which vital elements are shared. More than 22 million north-bound legal border crossings are recorded each year through El Paso, Texas by U.S. Customs officials. This suggests a "floating" border population that shares infectious disease agents. Tuberculosis is among the most significant infectious disease problems in the El Paso, Texas/Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua area because of the easy trans-border travel.

To address the problem of border TB transmission, the El Paso City-County Health and Environmental District (EPCCHED), the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), and the Mexican Secretariat of Health (Secretaria de Salud)(SSA) agreed that the two countries must work collectively to control and prevent TB in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. A proposal was submitted to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to enhance binational TB control. The CDC approved a modest grant in August 1991 and the Binational Tuberculosis Prevention and Control Project "Juntos" was born. The funding from CDC provided the El Paso City-County Health and Environmental District the opportunity to begin building the infrastructure and developing the capacity needed to enhance binational TB control in the greater El Paso/Ciudad Juarez area. This Project has been recognized internationally as a model project for Binational TB control.

     The general objective of the project is to promote TB control activities in the Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua-El Paso, Texas area, through binational collaboration between the respective Health Departments of both cities.

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Last Updated October 26, 2005