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.

The idea of becoming sick in order to look healthy or beautiful speaks to how profoundly consumptive beauty ideals still shape the world we share.

His illness was a product of Sierra Leone’s centuries-long impoverishment, of a healthcare system hollowed out by colonization and war and Ebola, of a world that stopped caring about TB when it ceased to be a threat to the rich.

It reminded me that when we know about suffering, when we are proximal to it, we are capable of extraordinary generosity.

The “social determinants of health”—food insecurity, systemic marginalization based on race or other identities, unequal access to education, inadequate supplies of clean water, and so on—cannot be viewed independently of the “healthcare system,” because they are essential facets of healthcare.

I would submit that TB in the twenty-first century is not really caused by a bacteria that we know how to kill. 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.