How can an infectious disease that has been preventable and curable for decades continue to kill 1.5 million individuals each year? In his latest book, Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, John Green tackles this question through a grand narrative that blends epidemiology, literature, and history with personal storytelling. The book’s March 2025 release coincided with sharp US foreign aid cuts that have since destabilized global tuberculosis programs.
At the heart of Green’s book is Henry Reider, a seventeen-year-old from Sierra Leone who was diagnosed with tuberculosis when he was six. For Green, the story of Henry’s life illustrates the toll of the disease on humanity. When we hear that 10.8 million people fell ill with tuberculosis in the past year, or that funding cuts have left hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients without treatment, it is easy to treat these figures as just numbers on a page. Green understands this distance and draws on patients’ own words to rehumanize the data. He situates individual stories within cultural contexts of illness: while medieval Europe cast out leprosy patients, precolonial Africa did not; while nineteenth-century Europe romanticized tuberculosis as a “flattering disease,” many patients in Africa today face stigma and isolation. “These illness narratives are often not just a strategy for conceptualizing the pain of others, but also a way of reassuring ourselves that we’ll never feel that pain,” Green writes.
Tuberculosis is also just a weird disease, both biologically and sociologically. “For centuries, this disease has used social forces and prejudice to thrive wherever power systems devalue human lives,” Green writes. The bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M. tuberculosis) causes tuberculosis disease only occasionally after infecting humans, and it grows and reproduces much more slowly than other infectious pathogens. Scientists still remain uncertain of all the dynamics at play in infections of M. tuberculosis, including why a significant portion of patients recover from tuberculosis without treatment. Yet, humans are good at coming up with ways to kill things, and drugs to assassinate M. tuberculosis from human bodies are no exception. The current problem lies with the lack of access and affordability to tuberculosis treatments in developing regions of the world—a sad continuation of the devastation tuberculosis has reaped through human history and human doing.
“We can do and be so much for each other—but only when we see one another in our full humanity,” Green writes. His book insists that behind every statistic is someone like Henry, and until we recognize that, tuberculosis will remain both a disease and a human failure.