Tuberculosis (TB) is often thought of as a disease of the past. It is something we have all seen in period films and books: a character raises a handkerchief to their mouth and coughs up a spot of blood with a look of horror. We know, instinctively, that TB will be their end.
But TB is very much still a disease of the present. According to the World Health Organization, TB killed over a million people in 2023, and has regained its spot as the world’s deadliest disease after the decline of COVID-19. This is not because TB is impossible to cure; medication to cure it has been around since the 1950s. The real culprit for the astronomical death count is more sinister: corporate greed, capitalism and racism.
“Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection” is the latest book by bestselling author John Green, and his second nonfiction book. Most know Green for his incredibly popular young adult fiction novels, such as “The Fault in Our Stars,” but Green is also a social advocate and history buff, and has spent the last five years researching TB and advocating for the eradication of the disease.
This novel is one part an easily accessible crash course on the history of TB, and another part a social commentary on the societal forces preventing it from being cured worldwide. The history sections are engrossing and easily digestible, at some parts funny and other parts gut-wrenching. Some of the most entertaining passages see Green connecting seemingly unrelated events to TB, such as the invention of the cowboy hat, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and even New Mexico becoming a state. Other historical passages are less comedic but no less shocking, such as women’s beauty standards mirroring the appearance of TB patients in the 1700s and 1800s.
Green also outlines how the perceptions and stigmas around TB have changed. Once a disease thought to be confined to “the white man” and that killed our best poets, now these stereotypes are a different kind of victim: poor and dark skinned.
The modern half of the book largely speaks on the TB crisis in Sierra Leone, a tropical country in West Africa bordering the Atlantic Ocean, focusing on a seventeen-year-old boy named Henry dying from a drug-resistant strain of TB. Green describes the tiring and complicated process one must endure to receive TB treatment in Sierra Leone, and the lack of proper medication in the country due to the steep prices pharmaceutical companies charge for their patented cures. Curing drug resistant TB in Sierra Leone is difficult and unlikely, a process that is nearly foolproof in wealthier countries such as America.
Perhaps the most compelling part of this book is Green himself and the way he conveys this story. His empathy bleeds through the pages. He makes you care deeply about the victims of this preventable disease, as if you are sitting listening to their stories, just as he had.
It takes a lot for a book to make me cry, and yet, one section of “Everything Is Tuberculosis” brought me to tears, and one about “Marco Polo” at that. Green tells the story of Shreya Tripathi, a TB victim and activist from India. During the days before her death, she was reading Green’s book, “The Fault in Our Stars.” Green relates their connection to the game Marco Polo.
“Writing is like [Marco Polo] for me, like I’m typing ‘Marco, Marco, Marco’ for years, and then finally the work is finished and someone reads it and says, ‘Polo.’ And so here is Shreya, saying ‘Polo’ to me from across the great divide. But she is also saying ‘Marco.’ She is also telling me to hear her voice, and answer her call… I hear Shreya, and Henry, and so many others calling to me: Marco. Marco. Marco.”
“Everything Is Tuberculosis” is not only an accessible account of the deadliest disease in human history. It is a stand against medical injustice. A fight against the wealthy who hold the cure for TB behind a paywall. A call to rise up against those who would trade lives in order to keep their fortunes. Green persists that the tuberculosis crisis is no longer about who can cure TB, but rather who has enough empathy to get the cure to the people who actually need it.
Green leaves readers with one final line of thought. A call to action. “Ultimately, we are the cause [of tuberculosis]. We must also be the cure.”
