Everything Is Tuberculosis
John Green
Crash Course Books, $28
A few years ago, renowned author John Green met a boy named Henry at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. Henry was small and, at first glance, looked about 9 years old to Green. Everyone at the hospital seemed to know and love him, making Green believe he was the child of a health care worker. That is until staff revealed that Henry was a patient with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis — and that he was 17.
Henry was small because he grew up malnourished. At age 5, he became ill with tuberculosis, which waxed and waned within his body for most of his youth, further emaciating him.
Green’s latest nonfiction book, Everything is Tuberculosis, weaves Henry’s story into the social and medical history of tuberculosis — one of the world’s deadliest bacterial diseases. Over 1 million people died of tuberculosis in 2023, despite our ability to cure infections with antibiotics and prevent them with vaccines. “We know how to live in a world without tuberculosis,” Green writes. “But we choose not to live in that world.”
That’s partly due to stigma, a central theme of the book. Negative, unfair beliefs about tuberculosis have been used to dehumanize and blame people for their illness. In some communities, the sick have been shunned, thought to be cursed or possessed by demons. In 18th and 19th century Europe, the disease was romanticized as an affliction of poets and artists. Like stigma, Green argues, this belief allowed society to other the sick as fundamentally different and even accept their deaths as “divine compensation” for their poetry and art.
Today, people living with tuberculosis have told Green that fighting stigma is even harder than fighting the disease itself. Through stories of Henry and others like him, Green argues convincingly that 21st century tuberculosis is caused not by bacteria but by injustice. He retraces the path of this injustice, from the disease’s racialization in the 19th and 20th centuries to the ongoing global misallocation of treatments. Green contends, for instance, that Henry might have accessed safer and more appropriate medication sooner if it weren’t for where he lives. Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Health couldn’t afford the high costs set by U.S. pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson for a treatment that might have cured Henry earlier.
In the end, Green reminds readers that we all must care. “In a world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause,” Green writes. “We must also be the cure.”
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