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

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

In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John be_came 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 advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequi_ties that allow this curable, preventable infec_tious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.

In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henrys story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our worldand how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.