FERI-TB was founded to close a gap the U.S. public health system has struggled with for decades: the distance between a TB diagnosis and a completed treatment course, and the structural conditions that determine whether that distance can be crossed.
To advance equity, restore dignity, and strengthen treatment adherence for individuals affected by TB — through patient-centered support, culturally grounded education, and partnerships that address the social determinants of health.
Founded in 2025 and headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, FERI-TB is a 501(c)(3) public charity serving Virginia and Maryland. Our work sits at the intersection of infection prevention, community health, and health equity — informed by epidemiologic evidence and delivered by teams embedded in the communities we serve.
Samuel D. Worgee is a certified Infection Preventionist and public health epidemiologist with more than a decade of experience spanning U.S. health systems and international outbreak response. His career sits precisely where FERI-TB operates: at the meeting point of clinical infection control, epidemiologic surveillance, and the community conditions that determine whether prevention actually works.
As an Infection Preventionist at Carilion Clinic's Roanoke Memorial Hospital, he co-chaired the ventilator-associated pneumonia committee and led interventions that reduced healthcare-associated infections and spared the hospital an estimated $1.5 million in CMS penalties in FY2023 — the first time in five years the facility had achieved that result. Earlier, at the University of Maryland Medical System, he directed COVID-19 mitigation across eight skilled nursing facilities during the height of the pandemic, working directly with the populations most vulnerable to transmission.
His expertise has been recognized nationally: he served as a Subject Matter Expert for APIC's a-IPC™ certification learning system, developing the source content used to train the next generation of infection preventionists. Internationally, he served as Infection Prevention and Control Focal Person for an Ebola Community Care Center project in Liberia, where he cut infection risk by an estimated 95% across 85 health workers spanning 13 clinics — work that shaped his conviction that infection control succeeds or fails on the strength of community trust.
He holds an MPH in Epidemiology from the University of Northampton (UK) and is completing his doctorate in public health (DrPH) at Walden University, where his IRB-approved dissertation examines how employment status and housing stability shape tuberculosis treatment adherence in Virginia — the exact structural determinants FERI-TB was founded to address. He founded FERI-TB in 2025 to turn that evidence into on-the-ground support for the patients most likely to fall through the cracks of the current TB response.
FERI-TB is governed by a board whose credentials span pharmacy practice, molecular biology, microbiology, and public health — the disciplines that together define modern TB response.
Every program we build is grounded in the epidemiologic and social science literature on TB adherence and structural determinants — and evaluated with the same rigor.
The people most affected by TB — immigrant and refugee communities, unstably housed patients, low-income workers — are the ones our programs are designed around.
TB treatment is a nine-month experience. Whether that experience feels like surveillance or like support determines whether it succeeds. We choose support.
Whether you're a health department looking for a community partner, a hospital system exploring referral pathways, a funder aligned with our mission, or an individual donor who cares about health equity — there's a role for you here.
