Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green

Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green is the current It Book of the Interwebz. 

Green became interested in tuberculosis on a trip to Sierra Leone, where he was apparently doing a project on maternal mortality, but then he went to a TB hospital and it changed his whole life. 

He met a young boy with TB and it sent him off on years of research about the disease. If you had asked me before I read this book, I would have said that I thought TB was a disease of the past, a disease of Romantic poets and the Brontës. But, as we find out in the first five pages of this book, that could not be further from the truth. 

Still, over a million people died of tuberculosis in 2023. That year, in fact, more people died of TB than died of malaria, typhoid, and war combined. (page 4)

Today, we understand tuberculosis as an infection caused by bacteria. TB is airborne - it spreads from person to person through small particles contained in coughs, sneezes, or exhalations. Anyone can get tuberculosis - in fact, between one-quarter and one-third of all living humans have been infected with it. In most people, the infection will lie dormant for a lifetime. But up to 10 percent of the infected will eventually become sick, a phenomenon we call "active TB." (page 5-6)

There is a cure for TB - antibiotics - but, as you can imagine, the distribution of antibiotics across the globe is unequal and countries that are poorer and/or have poor infrastructure for transporting medicines have citizens who suffer rates of TB at higher rates than more well-developed nations. This books tells the story of how this came to be. 

And it's super interesting. It's really important - I think drawing attention to the fact that literal millions of people are dying because of TB is an interesting thing for Green to do with his platform. I hope it brings more money to getting medicines to the populations in most need. 

But I find John Green's writing tic of inserting himself into every story to be...annoying? distracting? self-absorbed? Why do I have to know he has OCD? Why do I have to know about his brother's cancer? It's not relevant, but Green obviously can't resist but making every story about himself. He doesn't have TB and if he had, it would have been treated quickly in the US with the proper medication. This has a 4.55/5 stars on Goodreads, so I'm obviously in the minority her because I wish this book had been written by a different author. 

3/5 stars

Lines of note:

The United States of America, Charles Dickens once noted, was "a nation of spitters." People spit on trolleys and on sidewalks, on restaurant floors and even in the home. (page 98)

"How many would die if everyone could access good healthcare?" he asked me, as if he seemed confused by my question.
"Yes," I said.
"None. Zero. Zero people should die of TB."
It is difficult to imagine eliminating tuberculosis entirely. The disease has many animal reservoirs, and because a quarter of all people living are infected with it, the total elimination of TB is a distant dream. But we could live in a world where no one dies of TB. (page 181)

Things I looked up:

multidimensionally poor (page 25) - A person who is poor can suffer multiple disadvantages at the same time – for example they may have poor health or malnutrition, a lack of clean water or electricity, poor quality of work or little schooling. Focusing on one factor alone, such as income, is not enough to capture the true reality of poverty.

Hat mentions (why hats?): 

"Did you know tuberculosis helped give us the cowboy hat?" (page 14)

Regaining his health over the next few years, John noticed something different about the West: The hats sucked. Fur traders of European descent often wore bug-infested, brimless coonskin caps. Folks who made their way to Missouri from Texas and Mexico, meanwhile, tended to wear wide-brimmed straw hats that protected from the sun but leaked in the rain. So after returning to the northeast with his consumption under control, John B. Stetson created a new sort of hat, which in time came to be known as the cowboy hat. (page 16)