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

by John Green

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

It is common to say that Sierra Leone is a poor country, but this is not the case. It is an exceptionally rich country with vast wealth in metal ores and especially in diamonds, which during centuries of colonialism encrusted many a British crown. After achieving independence in 1961, the new government struggled to transition away from this extraction-based economy. This was in part because systems to mine and export diamonds and minerals were more mature and robust than any other economic sector, and in part because independence didn’t change the fact that many of the most valuable assets in Sierra Leone were (and still are) foreign-owned. Although the economy grew and life expectancy increased after independence, the country remained deeply impoverished. The Sierra Leonean physician Dr. Bailor Barrie once told me, “If you want to understand why Sierra Leone is poor, you must look at a map of our railroads.”

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

“death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing.”

One day, young Gale overheard a terrible secret about her best friend Angie: Angie’s sister Pauline, who wrote her weekly, had in fact already died of TB. “But her father didn’t want her to know,” Gale recalled, because it might cause the kind of emotional shock that was deemed dangerous to the TB patient. So to encourage the daughter he still had, this father wrote letters that mimicked the handwriting and style of the daughter he’d lost.

The widespread phenomenon of cows infecting humans with tuberculosis decreased with the advent of tuberculin-based testing of cow herds alongside the pasteurization of milk.