County to Spend More to Battle Tuberculosis : Health: Supervisors OK $1.5-million outlay for additional workers at schools, clinics and jails. Testing program is planned at schools.

In the hope of preventing more local outbreaks of tuberculosis, the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved spending an extra $1.5 million to help public health officials fight the disease.

The Orange County Health Care Agency will use the money to hire 33 more health workers for schools, clinics and jails. Health officials plan to test all first-time students from first grade through high school this fall and to open tuberculosis clinics across the county.

From 1990 through 1993, the number of new cases of tuberculosis reported annually in the county increased 71%, from 258 to 440.

The unusual midyear budget increase will strengthen the county’s previous $5-million anti-tuberculosis program, which includes a 70-person staff. “The idea was to get started right away,” Board Chairman Thomas F. Riley said. “This is certainly, in my opinion, one of the most important public health items that has come to the board since I’ve been on it. I’m really proud of the county staff for their ingenuity in getting this thing set up and moving in a hurry.”

Penny Weismuller, the county’s manager of disease control, said she was pleased that the board approved the funds without waiting for the usual budget process to take its course.

“This gives us the resources to move ahead and do a more effective job controlling this disease,” she said. It will also allow health care workers to monitor more closely the treatment of people who are infected.

Board members previously had said they considered the program to be a top priority and were alarmed by the outbreak last year of drug-resistant tuberculosis at La Quinta High School in Westminster.

In that outbreak, active cases of the disease were diagnosed in 12 students, with all the cases linked to that of a 16-year-old girl. Federal officials later concluded that the outbreak at La Quinta was sparked by delayed diagnosis and inadequate treatment of the girl, whose disease was contagious for more than two years.

An official with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta has said that Orange County is among many public health care agencies throughout the nation surprised by the resurgence of the disease, which until the mid-1980s was thought to be on the brink of eradication.

The resurgence, officials say, is linked to a variety of factors, including more widespread poverty, increased immigration from countries where the disease remains endemic, and the AIDS epidemic, which leaves patients susceptible to TB.