Everything Is Tuberculosis (Signed Edition): The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
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John Green, acclaimed author and passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Signed edition
“The real magic of Green’s writing is the deeply considerate, human touch that goes into every word.” –The Associated Press
″Told with the intelligence, wit, and tragedy that have become hallmarks of the author’s work.... This is the story of us.” –Slate
“Earnest and empathetic.” –The New York Times
Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.
In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.
In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.
John Green, acclaimed author and passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Signed edition
“The real magic of Green’s writing is the deeply considerate, human touch that goes into every word.” –The Associated Press
″Told with the intelligence, wit, and tragedy that have become hallmarks of the author’s work.... This is the story of us.” –Slate
“Earnest and empathetic.” –The New York Times
Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.
In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.
In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.
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Community Reviews
a nice entry level narrative into tuberculosis and more generally, social determinants of health. would recommend to non-ph friends for sure.
I have been interested in TB since a positive skin test as a teen in the early 1980s. A year’s course of Isoniazid and multiple chest x-rays became my personal connection to the disease. Because of that experience, I also did a research paper on the disease. Even still, I learned so much more in reading John Green’s book. Exploring the history of tb through the lenses of biomedical and social structures as well as the very real human experience as he relates Henry’s story, we learn about a disease that still threatens the world. It’s fascinating how poverty, racism, and stigma controls who is deemed worthy of a cure. Mr. Green putting his platform behind changing this dynamic is added benefit of his hyper fixation on learning about tb. Perhaps he will inspire more people to get involved.
I think I held most of the stereotypes that people typically have about tuberculosis—not least the paradoxical pairing of “it’s not really an issue anymore” alongside “there really isn’t a cure.” Obviously, I’m now disabused of both notions. But what’s much more powerful is Green’s indictment of our broad (societal/national/international) approach to this awful disease. He sums it up very clearly, just a few pages in: “We know how to live in a world without tuberculosis. But we choose not to live in that world.”
He returns to that essential point several more times in the book, driving it deep while also, I think, leaning toward an acknowledgement that this isn’t even just about TB. We routinely abandon those who fall victim to all manner of inescapable maladies, and not just physical ones. “Why,” Greene asks, “must we treat what are obviously systemic problems as failures of individual morality?” He’s 100% on point, and so his proposed remedy also lands firmly in place: We must fight “for better systems that understand human health not primarily as a market, but primarily as a shared priority for our species. . . . We must address the root cause of tuberculosis, which is injustice.”
It’s well put, and worth reading.
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