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Did you cognise thattuberculosis(TB ) brought us the Adirondack chair ? TB patient used to recline , completely fast , upon that now - iconic piece of furniture on the orders of their doctors . TB also brought about the city of Pasadena , California , and Colorado Springs , Colorado , which were founded as station for TB patients to seek fresh air . And did you make love that before write " Sherlock Holmes , " Sir Arthur Conan Doyle expose a supposed cure for TB that had been overhyped in the press in the nineteenth C ?
In " Everything Is TB : The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection " ( clangour Course Books , 2025),John Greenrecounts these unvalued path in which TB shaped history . He also highlights how public perception of the disease has lurch through time . TB was once seen as a quixotic condition that translate the great unwashed with the unwellness " beautiful , " " waiflike " and " sensitive , " but the unwellness later became ensure as a denounce disease of poverty .
Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium behind tuberculosis, can become extremely drug resistant, complicating the treatment of the disease.
And while we now have a therapeutic for TB , " the disease is where the curative is not , " Green notes , paraphrasing a Ugandan MD who said the same about HIV / AIDS treatments . every year , there are more than10 million cases of TB and 1 million TB deaths worldwide , and most of these shell and fatalities occur in low- and middle - income body politic .
Green is one - half of thevlogbrotherson YouTube , Centennial State - creator of the educational seriesCrash Course , and writer of the bestselling Book " The Fault in Our Stars " ( Penguin Books , 2012 ) and " The Anthropocene Reviewed " ( E. P. Dutton , 2021 ) , among others . Live Science spoke with him about his late book , its featured national , TB survivor Henry Reider , and the incertain future of efforts to end TB worldwide .
Nicoletta Lanese : In the account book , you say that you initially thought of TB as a disease of the past tense — of " nineteenth - hundred poet . " How was it to have that idea drive away through writing the Word ?
John Green.
John Green : If you ’d ask me in 2018 , " What are the biggest infectious wellness problems facing the worldly concern , " I would have said , " I do n’t be intimate , malaria , HIV , enteric fever , cholera . " I would have been so far down the list before I articulate T.B. , even though it turn out TB is the deadliest infectious disease in the world and churn up over 10 million people every year .
To some extent , that ’s been a throughline throughout history — when Robert Koch was declare that he ’d fall upon that TB was infectious , he almost seemed defensive . He said , " I roll in the hay we ’re more afraid of cholera and infestation , but really TB is a much fully grown deal . "
I just had no musical theme that TB was a crisis until I visited a TB hospital in Sierra Leone in 2019 . … [ There ] I met a young boy namedHenry Reider , and that kind of change the course of my life history .
NL : Henry is a large focus of the ledger . For those who have n’t learn it yet , could you share a spot about him ?
JG : Henry and I met at that hospital in Sierra Leone , and when we come , he just grabbed me by the T - shirt and commence walk me around the infirmary . He seemed to be about the same geezerhood as my son , who was 9 at the meter , and he also partake in a name with my son . They [ now ] call each other " the namesake . "
He take the air me all around the hospital , shew me the research lab , showed me the wards where patients were stay on . I was really astonished by how many people were sick and how sick they were . And we last made our way back to where the doctors were , and they sort of shoo away Henry away and I said , " Whose minor is that ? " And they say , " He ’s a patient role , and he ’s one of the patient we ’re most implicated about . "
It turns out , he was n’t 9 . He was 17 — just he ’d been stunt by malnutrition and by TB .
He and I have become really good friends and through the process of report this — like , I ’m not a adept reporter . I do n’t know how to have a distance between the reporter and the subject , as I endeavor to admit in the book . He root on the Word of God in many manner because I reckon if I had n’t gather Henry that day , I probably would n’t have become obsessed with TB .
NL : And how is Henry doing now ?
JG : He ’s very excited about the leger . He ’s a junior at the University of Sierra Leone , Sierra Leone ’s best university , and he ’s studying human resources and management and doing really , really well .
However , it is also true that like so many multitude whose lives are marginalize , his life is made much more fragile by the recent cuts to USAID , and his life is made much more challenging by the late cuts to USAID . That ’s been a constant matter of conversation between him and me over the last few weeks .
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[ Although Henry has now been heal of TB ] , Henry also has other health problem , and he has some long - term consequences from having lived with such serious tuberculosis . Like a tidy sum of masses , he look upon USAID - fund medicament to make it , and that funding has been canceled .
He and I had a conversation of late where I said , " Look , you love , we ’ll verify that you and your mom have access to the medication that you need . " And he said , " give thanks you , but what about everyone else ? "
NL : From your description of him , that seems like a query he would ask .
JG : Yeah , he ’s an extraordinarily empathic person . He ’s a poet . He has what used to be call spes phthisica [ intend " consumptive spirit " ] , the " tubercular personality . " We used to intend that people who had this tubercular personality tended to be sensitive and active to the suffering in the globe and generous and beautiful and lots of other wild-eyed ideal .
NL : In the book , you explore how the percept of TB has changed through time , starting with that amorous , idealize vision of the disease . Could you sum up what you learned ?
JG : It ’s almost like they ’re two unlike disease . It ’s almost like the disease of consumption [ a preceding name for TB ] is different from the disease of tuberculosis . Because at least in Northern Europe and the U.S. , consumption was an inherited disease that was associated with being beautiful and receive certain personality trait that were suitable . Tuberculosis is see as a disease of poverty , a disease of filth , a disease of transmission . They ’re very different disease in the way they ’re imagined , even though they have the same effort and the same line .
You see this all over the story of T.B. , but I think you especially see it in the means the disease was racialized . It was wide believed in the 18th and nineteenth centuries that only whitened masses could get tuberculosis . And then in the twentieth and 21st hundred , it was conceive white multitude were insulate from T.B. in some ways and that it ’s a disease in the main of people of color .
The direction that I believe about it sometimes is that Charles Dickens spell that tuberculosis was the " disease that riches never guard off , " and , of course , now it ’s a disease that wealth alone wards off .
NL : We ’ve pertain on this already , but could you expand on how USAID factors into TB effort worldwide and what it entail for that financial backing to be disrupted ?
JG : We did have on-going project I would have like to play up . I would have liked to highlight ourwork in the Philippines with USAIDto get TB down to zero in specific communities to provide a pattern for how we rule out TB from the satellite . [ Beyond our own body of work ] , I ’d like to highlight the work that has been done to reduce TB death by over 50 % in the last 25 years . I ’d like to foreground the efforts that are being made by the U.S. government and others to radically reduce the burden of tuberculosis in the most impoverished country in the world . But we ’ve just abandon all of those .
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The project that we ’ve been working on in the Philippines withPartners In Healthand USAID and the Filipino government will continue in some manner , thanks to the generousness of the Philippine government . But it wo n’t execute its full-grown dreams , and that ’s whole because of the decision to contain fund essentially all global health services .
I ’m confused as to how all of this is happening , but I ’m just also heartbroken . I ’m hear every Clarence Shepard Day Jr. from people who are having to make horrifying decisions about how to ration care .
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NL : And in TB , continuity of care is very significant .
JG : Continuity of upkeep is crucial for curing tuberculosis . If someone has even a couple of weeks without memory access to their medication , it ’s vastly more probable that their disease will become drug resistant , which is a personal disaster because it mean that they are much more probable to die of T.B. . It ’s also a societal cataclysm because it think of there ’s much more drug - resistive T.B. blow around , having the chance to evolve ever more drug ohmic resistance .
I think it ’s of import to understand that we ’ve never done anything like this before ; we ’ve never suddenly interrupt the treatment of G or ten of thousands or hundred hundreds of thousands . We do n’t even know how many the great unwashed ’s discussion is being disturb right now because we have no agency to count it . … What we ’re doing to the future of T.B. is unconscionable to me .
NL : In a moment when the post feel so bleak , is there anything bringing you Leslie Townes Hope ?
JG : It ’s inevitable for me to feel like I last at the ending of history because today is the most late Clarence Shepard Day Jr. I ’ve ever experienced , you know , and so this feels like the culmination of everything that came before , but I do n’t subsist at the end of history . I go in the middle of history , and this is not the end of the story ; this is the middle of the story , and we have to fight for a better ending .
That ’s what gives me hope , and influence with the great unwashed I have a go at it . In this employment , you get to work with people you manage about and whose love and attention is focus in the same direction as yours , and there ’s a lot of ease in that for me .
Everything Is Tuberculosis : The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
In " Everything Is T.B. , " John Green tells the story of Henry Reider , a tuberculosis patient he met at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone . Throughout the book , he weave Henry ’s story with scientific and societal history of how T.B. has shaped our cosmos — and how our selection will shape the future of T.B. .
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