Award Recipients

Henry A. Renteln, M.D. 1922-1997

“Dr. Renteln was the first recipient and the Award was named in his honor because of his many years of tireless work, often alone, to maintain a functioning TB control program in California at a time when TB was not “fashionable” and a strong advocate was needed at the State level to preserve resources for managing TB. Dr. Renteln was the State TB control program, providing field support in outbreak investigations, training programs on TB control, data analysis, and expert consultation as a one-man show.

In his later years, many of us grew to know and admire Henry in his second public health career at the San Francisco health department. He is remembered as a thoughtful, witty, and erudite coworker with a very broad interest in the world around him. Although Henry had significant health problems in these years, he never dwelled on them and always showed up with his beret at a jaunty angle.

Dr. Renteln was born in 1922 in Berlin, the son of Russian/Estonian refugees who had fled from the Bolsheviks. Despite being a Russian national, he was drafted into the German Army during WWII and was wounded on the Russian front. He survived the war and completed his medical studies in Munich in 1948. His sense of adventure, as well as his status as essentially a man without a country, took him to the practice of medicine in rural Iran. In 1953, he emigrated to the United States (well, actually to Berkeley).

He began his career with the State of California Department of Health Services in 1957. He served as Chief of General Epidemiology from 1959 to 1968, then took a leave and worked for the USAID in Turkey and India. He returned to the State as Chief of TB Control from 1970 until October 1983. That year he retired from the State and, acting on his long interest in the Middle East, worked for a year in Saudi Arabia. In January 1985, finding that he still wanted to be a part of public health, he began working as Deputy Director of the Communicable Disease Control Bureau for San Francisco. After his second retirement in 1987, he continued to serve until 1992 as a part-time consultant to the TB Control Division of San Francisco, assisting us with the early development of our computerized data management and record systems as well as evaluating our school entry TB screening program.

For those of us who knew Dr. Renteln, he is sorely missed as a mentor and friend.”

Rosemarie “Reina” Whitney, 2019 Inaugural Award Recipient

Mrs Rosemarie “Reina Whitney entered the Vauclain Home Sanitarium, at age 26, four months into her first pregnancy in March of 1951.  Without the current drug regimens of today, Mrs. Whitney was on flat bed rest for one year.  She left the sanitarium in September of 1952.  She gave birth to her first child, a daughter, five months into her prescribed treatment.  While separated from her young family, Mrs Whitney found support and fellowship among the other patients at the Vauclain Home, local San Diegans, living in isolation with similar challenges.  Upon completion of her treatment, which included the newly found treatment, “Isoniazid,” Mrs Whitney left the Vauclain Home, but not the friendships she created there.

With the financial support of the San Diego Tuberculosis Association, Mrs. Whitney with a few other former patients, worked to create, The Patient Voice, a monthly newspaper providing up-to-date medical, vocational, and social news related to TB.  With Mrs Whitney editing, The Patient Voice volunteer corps provided this newspaper to all TB patients in San Diego County from 1953-1960.  As a result of Mrs Whitney’s leadership and her volunteer journalists, The Patient Voice reminded those newly diagnosed with TB and Vauclain residents, that they were part of a unique community where everyone was welcomed, not isolated based on their health status.  Today, Mrs. Whitney, now 94, lives in Pleasanton, California.  In celebration of her determination to foster hope and fellowship among a diverse group of individuals whose common denominator is overcoming TB, the California TB Controllers Association would like to award her the inaugural Rosemarie “Reina” Whitney Patient Award for outstanding leadership in the name of patient advocacy and TB elimination.