Dear SAPHA Professionals,  

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the South Asian Public Health Association (SAPHA) Fall 2011 Newsletter. As you will recall, at the beginning of 2011, we embarked on taking SAPHA to the next level. In this effort, we had dedicated our small but committed team to launch quarterly SAPHA newsletters. We are proud to say that we met our goal this year and this is the final of our four quarterly newsletters! We hope you have found these newsletters to be both informative and professional.   

This edition of our newsletter contains information about many recent and upcoming SAPHA achievements. We are excited to report that in addition to our quarterly newsletters, SAPHA was able to commemorate National Public Health Week earlier this April by issuing revised SAPHA factsheets on diverse topics ranging from chronic to infectious diseases. We are adding to this list periodically and just recently - in honor of National Preparedness Month- issued a new SAPHA Emergency Preparedness factsheet. These factsheets can be found on our current SAPHA website (www.sapha.org).

Speaking of websites - behind the scenes - SAPHA recently contracted with Zoq Design (www.zoqdesign.com), a national leader in creative website design, to redesign our SAPHA website as well as our SAPHA logo. While this redesign has involved lots of work around both the aesthetics and functionality of the about-to-be-launched website, we are proud to say that our newly-revamped website is almost ready to 'go live'. We are excited to unveil our website at our upcoming SAPHA Annual Event, giving SAPHA members a 'first look' into the website - we hope you can join us!

Join us where? Well, indeed, our SAPHA Annual Chai & Samosa Event (details below) is all the rage and is taking place in Washington, D.C., on Sunday October 30th, coinciding with the start of the American Public Health Association (APHA) 2011 Annual Meeting. We are looking forward to meeting many of you at our annual meeting and sharing with you SAPHA's many accomplishments to date!

Sadly, this month, the SAPHA Board was faced with a tragic event  involving one of our fellow board members. Mr. Mayur Patel, current SAPHA Treasurer and SAPHA Board member for the last four years, was involved in a tragic boating accident in the Chicago area. While recovery efforts continue, we continue to ask our SAPHA family to keep Mayur and his family in your thoughts and prayers. We plan on honoring Mayur at our upcoming annual meeting and hope you will join us.

Moving forward, SAPHA is also excited about our recent SAPHA elections in which we had a number of accomplished public health leaders nominated to run for next year's SAPHA Board of Directors. We are proud to say that this competitive election has now yielded an expanded Board of 11 members (from our current 7) and will allow SAPHA to continue to build upon this (and previous year's) accomplishments. Congratulations to all of our nominees and especially to our newly elected 2012-2013 SAPHA Board!

We remind SAPHA colleagues that in order to be eligible to serve on the SAPHA Board and to vote in  next year's SAPHA election, an individual has to be a paid SAPHA member by no later than January 1 of the year of the election - while it's too late for this year, this is a good reason to become a paid member for next year! 

Finally, we remind you that SAPHA remains committed to public health issues for the South Asian community and we look forward to working with you to help in this effort. As a reminder, SAPHA is a 501(c)3, non-profit organization, looking to you for help whether through volunteering, donations, or feedback. SAPHA is here for you and we look forward to having you join us as we continue to move forward!

SAPHA Board 2011