From the Bookshelf of Science and Inquiry…

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

John Green

Start date: October 1, 2025

Finish date: October 31, 2025

Discussion: Book Club 2025

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Book Club 2025

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What Members Thought

Mar 23, 2025 CatReader rated it liked it

John Green is an American novelist (probably best known for The Fault in Our Stars) and nonfiction writer. In 2025's Everything is Tuberculosis, Green gives a compelling overview of the current state of tuberculosis (TB) infections and treatment for the lay audience, focusing much of the narrative through a young Sierra Leonean man named Henry Reider battling multi-drug resistant TB infection.

As a medical professional, I do think Green oversimplified the issue -- TB isn't a problem only because ...more

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Oct 25, 2025 aPriL does feral sometimes rated it really liked it

Shelves: science, academic-notations, poverty-and-ignorance-horrors

‘Everything is Tuberculosis’ by John Green is about a very personal interest of the author’s. He met a boy, Henry, dying of tuberculosis at a government hospital in Lacca, Sierra Leone, in 2019, when he was visiting for an entirely different reason. He was shocked that Henry had been enduring treatment for almost two years, this his second time, and he had come back for treatment after several years had passed from his first attempt at treatment, and yet he was still not cured. He was also shock ‘Everything is Tuberculosis’ by John Green is about a very personal interest of the author’s. He met a boy, Henry, dying of tuberculosis at a government hospital in Lacca, Sierra Leone, in 2019, when he was visiting for an entirely different reason. He was shocked that Henry had been enduring treatment for almost two years, this his second time, and he had come back for treatment after several years had passed from his first attempt at treatment, and yet he was still not cured. He was also shocked to discover over a million people die of TB every year, and that it has become resistant to many of those treatments designed to cure it.

Green kept in touch with Henry, and decided to write a book about his struggle with tuberculosis. In doing so, Green realized social attitudes and corporate greed had more to do with the persistence of tuberculosis than the actual microbe’s nature.

Per Google:

.”According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 1.25 million people died from tuberculosis (TB) in 2023. This figure represents a decline from the 1.32 million deaths reported in 2022. However, TB remains the deadliest infectious disease globally, accounting for over 10 million new cases annually.”

‘Everything is Tuberculosis’ is not a medical book about TB, it is more of a history of TB combined with how social attitudes towards TB has affected cures.

I have copied the book blurb:

”John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, John Green met Henry, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone while traveling with Partners in Health. 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 and dynamic advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, treatable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing 1.5 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.”

This is an excellent general read! I learned a lot about tuberculosis which had been unknown to me except through 19th-century operas like La bohéme (1895) and early 20th-century novels like The Magic Mountain (1924), or movies like Tombstone (1993) and Moulin Rouge (2001). Until mid-20th century, tuberculosis is shown as a killer disease which stalks talented, sensitive or artistic White people who have deep feelings in most of the art of Western pop culture. Of course, this is not true. It is a disease caused by a bacteria. It is not a disease that attacks depending on a person’s artistic feelings or race or moral status.

Tuberculosis is almost unknown to most Western World citizens today. It is slow-growing disease, which while caused by a microorganism which can be killed through long-term regulated application of expensive antibiotics, it is rare today in vaccinated, well-fed, 24/7-electrified-places-so-refrigeration-is-available-constantly-as-a-result, hospitals-and-expensive-hospital-equipment-is-available-nearby-or-reached-easily-on-good-roads-to-drive-on, but especially-health-insurance-to cover-the-costs-of-treatments-costing-thousands-of-dollars-a-week, countries. In other words, wealthy Western World or first-nation countries. However, the bacteria thrives where people live closely together with no or an impoverished health care system, in those who have a compromised immune system, if malnutrition and insecure food sources are forever present, and perhaps air pollution. It is infectious, which was not understood throughout past history. Some researchers were misled in the direction of their researches because they thought initially it was an inherited disease. Of course, once it was understood to be linked to poverty, and was infectious, it became a stigmatized disease.

Green is clearly distressed by the lack of will by rich countries to help those without resources to effectively handle the months-long treatment regimens for tuberculosis (which he describes in this book). Because of this, he hints, one day, tuberculosis will be an incurable problem for wealthy countries, or it will be even more expensive to cure. TB is more and more resistant to treatment because of the often too soon discontinuation of required medications of tuberculosis patients in resource-poor countries. Gentler reader, Green says this much more poetically than I am writing in my own words. He is a much nicer person than I am, generally speaking, or in this case, generally writing.

So. In my own words, asshole Big Pharma corporations choose profits over their supposed mission of helping people. Again. ...more

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Feb 21, 2025 GONZA rated it really liked it · review of another edition

John Greens Buch ist völlig anders als alle anderen, die er bisher geschrieben hat, und der Autor erklärt auch seine Gründe dafür. Die Entdeckung einer Krankheit, die er für ausgerottet hielt, seine Bekanntschaft mit Henry, seine eigene Krankengeschichte sind einige der Gründe, die den Autor dazu veranlassten, diesen Essay zu schreiben, in dem die Geschichte der Tuberkulose mit der ihrer berühmtesten Erkrankten und auch mit der von Henry gegenübergestellt wird. Ein schönes Buch, aber sicherlich ...more

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Apr 05, 2025 David Schwan rated it liked it

Quick history of Tuberculosis, with the second half of the book discussing current treatment of the disease in Sierra Leone. The first half of the book has a bit too much presentation of how TB was a disease of poets and artists. TB kills 1.3 million people a year and while not a major disease in the US, we could see a mutated version (due to drug resistance) surge in the future.

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Mar 24, 2025 Cori rated it really liked it

Engaging read about tuberculosis as both an important element of history and today. It highlights the need for access to health care for everyone, as well as the need for foreign aid.

While I enjoyed that this was a quick read, I would have loved more depth to many aspects of this topic. To those who follow John Green, many things already felt familiar. Some of the "fun facts" he has shared on social media, and many of us are familiar with Henry. I'm glad he is using multiple platforms to share ...more

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