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

by John Green

We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth’s atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it—the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.

“Where are the drugs? The drugs are where the disease is not,” Dr. Mugyenyi said. “And where is the disease? The disease is where the drugs are not.”

tuberculosis has come to be seen as a disease of poverty, an illness that walks the trails of injustice and inequity that we blazed for it.

But as a friend once told me, “Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”

Looking at history through any single lens creates distortions, because history is too complex for any one way of looking to suffice.

In general, colonial infrastructure was not built to strengthen communities; it was built to deplete them.

But history, alas, is not merely a record of what we do, but also a record of what is done to us.

This brings us back to an important facet of understanding human responses to illness—stigma and the ethical narratives we construct around illness.

“I’m sorry, but while your cancer has a 92 percent cure rate when treated properly, there just aren’t adequate resources in the world to make that treatment available to you.” That world would be so obviously and unacceptably unjust. So how can I live in a world where Henry and his family are told that? How can I accept a world where over a million people will die this year for want of a cure that has existed for nearly a century?

TB in the twenty-first century is really caused by those social determinants of health, which at their core are about human-built systems for extracting and allocating resources. The real cause of contemporary tuberculosis is, for lack of a better term, us.

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.