Everything is Tuberculosis is the newest book by John Green, author of Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns, and my personal teenage obsession, The Fault in Our Stars.
Before I talk about the content of the book, I want to talk about the book itself.
I love the way the cover of the book feels. So many hardcovers in recent years have these soft, plasticky, smooth-ish, and ironically dust-attracting dust covers that always feel dirty. I have to take them off the entire time I’m reading a book because I hate the feel of them so much. Everything is Tuberculosis’ dust cover feels like actual quality. It has a very nice, papery-type texture to it and I was actually able to read the book with the cover on the entire time because it wasn’t a distraction.
I think this is the only time I’ve thought this much about the texture of a book cover. Whoever was in charge of making the decisions for the dust cover, hats off to you.
Everything is Tuberculosis provides a look into the history of the tuberculosis infection and examines through a sociological lens how the disease still persists today despite having a cure.
If you had asked me a few days ago before I started reading this book which disease was the deadliest in human history, I would’ve said the black plague. It killed an estimated 50 million people. Tuberculosis is estimated to have killed over a billion people.
If I’m being honest, I thought tuberculosis, like the black plague was one of those diseases of the past. The ones that people do rarely still get but are easily treated for. I had no clue that TB is not only the deadliest disease in history, it’s still currently the deadliest disease. Over 1 million people die each year from it.
Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.
This book made me angry. The level of medical inequity in the world is beyond infuriating.
John tells the story of his friend Henry, a Sierra Leonean who contracted TB at the age of 5. Henry was treated with the RIPE line of antibiotics which seemed promising at first, but was taken off of them after his father decided it would be better to pray the disease away.
Eventually, Henry’s mother resumed his TB treatment, and he was again prescribed the RIPE treatment, but stopping the antibiotics before finishing often contributes to developing drug-resistant forms of TB that places like Sierra Leone are often not able to treat effectively. And drug-resistant TB is exactly what Henry developed.
Over the span of more than a decade, Henry’s TB slowly became more severe. Coughing up blood, developing painful lesions on his lymph nodes, losing the ability to breathe properly, and losing hearing in one ear after being prescribed an ineffective treatment. Henry was close to death. He was so weak, he couldn’t even get out of bed to do anything more than go to the bathroom.
The most infuriating thing about this is Henry’s TB never should have gotten that bad. We have effective treatments for drug-resistant TB, but Sierra Leone’s hospitals are grossly underfunded. They can’t afford majority of the drugs beyond the basics (ie RIPE) because companies like Johnson & Johnson treat life-saving antibiotics as a good to be sold and patients like Henry as a consumer to be sold to.
Henry was able to finally get the treatment he needed and did recover, but many others in similar situations to him aren’t that fortunate.
Henry’s situation made me think about just how little those of us in America even have to consider diseases like TB. And then there’s this quote in the book:
Less commonly, we can also contract tuberculosis from other mammals—by eating infected seal meat, or by drinking raw milk from infected cows.
That made me think about how popular the recent trend of drinking raw milk has become among online “health gurus”, cottage-core mommy bloggers, and RFK Jr, the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
What these people truly are are conspiracy theorists who have decided the medical establishment and US government are actively working together to hide the fact that raw milk is akin to magic in its ability to heal for some unknown reason. Privileged people who have willfully chosen to ignore not just science but history. Often, these people have children they’re giving raw milk to as well.
While it’s not a widespread epidemic, herds of cows across the US are still diagnosed with TB with relative frequency.
In the event one of the raw milk aficionados were to contract TB from their miracle milk (let’s be real, it’s likely only a matter of time), what do you think would happen? Do you think their treatment plan would be similar to Henry’s or countless others in the global south? Do you think they would suffer from the disease for decades due to a lack of available resources? To both of those questions you know the answer is of course not.
Where are the drugs? The drugs are where the disease is not… And where is the disease? The disease is where the drugs are not.
For those of us in places like America, treatment for diseases like TB is almost an afterthought. “Yeah, contracting it sucks, but of course we can cure it, so let’s drink raw milk in the meantime.” We also saw this method of thinking with Covid and the anti-masker crowd. People here have the ability to take their health for granted and put themselves directly in harm’s way, because if anything were to happen, fixing it would be a nonissue.
Meanwhile, places in the global south are begging and screaming for the cure and it just doesn’t come. We need to uplift the rest of the world.
I very much agree with John’s final words of the book:
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.
Everything is Tuberculosis made me angry, it made me tear up, and it taught me a lot of valuable information that I had no clue about. I’ve had many discussions with my wife about the inequities and interesting facts brought up in the book. For anyone who’s interested in disease or ongoing social issues, this is definitely a book you should read.
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