s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]'s Reviews > Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

Turns out everything is also capitalism and that is why a preventable and curable disease still kills more a million people worldwide each year and remains the deadliest infectious disease. If you are also reminded of how the US intentionally fumbled the response to another recent pandemic, good work, you picked up on the underlying theme. John Green, beloved author, podcaster, global health initiative advocate and just genuinely empathetic Nice Guy of the literary world returns for his second non-fiction work with Everything is Tuberculosis, an endlessly engaging read that blends heartbreak with hope as he examines the notorious disease. Diving into the history of tuberculosis, Green explores how it is truly “everywhere,” having had long-lasting cultural effects on society, the arts (it was often called the “poets disease”, Stetson hats and even Adirondack chairs that were popularized in tuberculosis sanatoriums. It even shows up in stamp collections, such as this 1978 Finnish postage stamp, depicting the 1933 Paimio tuberculosis sanatorium:

The problem with tuberculosis being everywhere is that it definitely shouldn’t be and if pharmaceutical companies valued people over profits the world’s deadliest disease could be a thing of the past. Because, to be honest, until I read this book, I thought it was a thing of the past though, as Green states ‘nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past,’ so I need to check my privilege there and after all the discourse of 2020 I should have known disease prevention was at the bottom of the list for many people. Especially when that disease is far away though, as Green points out, allowing the problem to continue to fester will only create larger problems and will inevitably affect us as well such as the higher possibility of treatment resistant cases making its way to the US. Which is why Everything is Tuberculosis is such a great book as it is raising awareness while also being wildly accessible to deliver the wealth of research through personal memoir, testimonies, journalism, and delivered with a heavy dose of empathy.

‘And so we have entered a strange era of human history: A preventable, curable infectious disease remains our deadliest. That's the world we are currently choosing.’

I’ve known about John Green for years but have never really been on the “inside” of the fandom. Having read this, I get it. He comes across so well and does seem genuinely interested in helping and excited to educate. I like the guy based on this and I really appreciated the way he centers humanity and empathy. It is also a very quick read, surprisingly so considering the subject matter but this was almost impossible to put down. Green covers such an excellent array of topics and their intersections to show the systemic damage of issues such as profiteering and the troubled history of medical racism and misogyny. The big problem we see is that the disease isn’t something we can’t fix, its just something we choose not to as well as the issue that ‘the cure is where the disease is not, and the disease is where the cure is not.’ Green does a good job of showing us why we should care about a disease that might not currently threaten the reader and his stories about his friend, 17 year old Henry who Green met in a hospital in Sierra Leone, add a heartbreaking human element. Green doesn't eschew stats and medical jargon (though he does make it quite straightforward in layperson’s terminology) but he definitely transcends facts on paper into an impassioned account of the disease and plea for better global health initiatives to stymie the suffering and death.

‘What's different now from 1804 or 1904 is that tuberculosis is curable, and has been since the mid-1950s. We know how to live in a world without tuberculosis. But we choose not to live in that world.’

This book will certainly infuriate you and remind you that treating a disease isn’t really that profitable leading to a lack of resources in doing so. We may all remember Goldman Sachs asking ‘is curing patients a sustainable business model?’ and then juxtaposing it with Jonas Salk, the virologist who developed a vaccine for polio and refused to patent the vaccine and felt it was unethical to profit from it. Add to this the issue that the current US government officials are slashing foreign aid, disease prevention, the CDC, and basically anything beneficial to tax payers and this will only increase the issue of tuberculosis worldwide. There is currently an issue worldwide with tuberculosis patients unable to get treatment or tests, and the U.S. Agency for International Development has projected a 30% increase in cases worldwide as a direct result of the unemployable hotel chain mascot turned US president cutting medical funding. NOT AWESOME. But this also makes raising awareness all the more important.

‘People are not just their economic productivity. We do not exist primarily to be plugged into cost-benefit analyses. We are here to love and be loved, to understand and be understood.’

I really appreciated the heart and humanity here and Green standing up for victims of disease and attempting to curb the stereotypes about them. He discusses on how people who are‘ ill are treated as fundamentally other because the social order is frightened by what their frailty reveals about everyone else's,’ and that this sort of Othering only leads to perpetuating the spread of disease (such as the stigma around AIDs in the 80s and Reagan’s refusal to take action).

‘Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good. Stigma is a way of saying, “You deserved to have this happen,” but implied within the stigma is also, “And I don’t deserve it, so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me.’

The lack of funding and lack of efforts to cure disease is largely a lack of humanity. This is also frustrating in an era where distrust in medicine is a political weapon as well, though pharmaceutical companies and the utter horror that is the US health insurance system that openly price gouges and allows people to die of curable diseases aren’t doing themselves any favors either. ‘Survival is not primarily an act of individual will, of course. It's an act of collective will,’ he tells us, and we must all rally together to help humanity instead of stocks flourish and be healthy.

‘We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth's atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it- the story of the organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.’

I greatly enjoyed John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis and certainly learned a LOT here. Its very engaging and accessible without sacrificing depth, which is really wonderful and I’m glad to see him advocating for something so important. A quick read, but one I’m going to think about forever.

4.5/5

‘We cannot address TB only with vaccines and medications. We cannot address it only with comprehensive STP programs. We must also address the root cause of tuberculosis, which is injustice. In a world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause.
We must also be the cure.’