Everything is Tuberculosis Quietly Changed How I See the World

A review of Everything is Tuberculosis — and everything it stirred up

If you told me a year ago that a book about tuberculosis would make me teary-eyed on a Tuesday afternoon, I would have laughed at you.

But here I am.

I picked up Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green partly out of curiosity, partly because I already knew some of his Crash Course content on the subject. I figured it would be educational. I did not figure it would be this.

First, some context from a Jamaican perspective

When you grow up in Jamaica, TB is not something that lives in your daily conversation. You get vaccinated for it as a child with the BCG vaccine — and that's kind of where the story ends for most people.

Nobody's walking around saying "Oh, that person has TB."

You hear about it affecting people in less fortunate places in Africa or very poor countries. Somewhere far away.

I'll be honest with you. I held that bias well into reading this book.

And I think that's actually the most important thing this book gave me: a mirror.

Because that comfortable distance I had from TB? It's exactly what John Green spends the whole book dismantling.

The statistic that stopped me cold

TB kills more people than any other single infectious disease on the planet. More than wars. More than COVID. More than HIV/AIDS. It has been doing this for a very long time.

It is curable. Read that again.

It has been curable since the 1950s. Multiple antibiotics exist. The science is not the problem.

And yet as of 2024, over 1.2 million people died from tuberculosis. An estimated 10.7 million fell ill. That is not a history statistic. That is last year.

The WHO's own 2025 Global TB Report shows that the world is dramatically off-track on its targets — a 12% reduction in TB incidence when the goal was 50% by 2025. And now, on top of the existing funding gaps, research funding cuts including proposed major reductions to NIH budgets are threatening to undo what little progress has been made.

This is not a disease of the past. This is a disease of a world that has decided certain people's lives are not worth the investment.

The chapters that hit hardest

On race and narrative

Chapters 7 to 9 of the book cover something that I didn't expect to find so devastating: the way TB's story changed based on who was getting sick.

Before Robert Koch identified Mycobacterium tuberculosis in the late 19th century, TB was called a "white plague." The medical establishment largely believed Black people were immune to it. Not because they actually were but because there was no adequate healthcare access or tracking for Black people. If they had TB, white doctors considered it rare, or simply didn't count it.

Then after Koch's discovery? Suddenly the narrative flipped. TB became "a disease of the blacks." White doctors blamed race itself saying things like "their lung capacity is smaller."

Pure pseudoscience dressed up in medical authority.

Here's what that pattern shows you: the disease didn't change. The people in power just needed someone to blame.

The stigma works the same way today. HIV/AIDS was stigmatized as a "gay disease." TB was racialized.

On the human cost of systems

There's a story in the book about a young woman in India who sued her government for not making newer antibiotics available because they were too expensive. John Green compares TB patients to people calling "Marco" in the game Marco Polo. They're calling out, reaching for someone to acknowledge them.

That hit me harder than I expected.

Because the other truth the book keeps returning to is this: we hear numbers. We hear percentages. We hear "10.7 million cases." And the number stops being people. It becomes data. We saw the same thing during COVID — daily death counts that started feeling abstract after a while.

But these are still humans. People with families. People with names.

There's a boy named Henry in the book — first diagnosed with TB at five years old. His father took him off treatment when he was a child. He now has drug-resistant TB. Is it really fair to say he deserves this? The weight of a system failure collapsed onto one small life.

On what science can and can't do

This is the part that spoke to me most directly as a biotechnology student.

Robert Koch, the man who gave us Koch's postulates, who helped identify so many infectious disease agents — rushed to announce a "cure" for TB because he was competing with Louis Pasteur. His tuberculin failed. Spectacularly! People died. He never fully recovered from the controversy.

Good intentions did not matter. Impact did.

That duality is something I keep turning over. You can be genuinely brilliant, genuinely committed to science, and still cause harm when ego and pride and competition override rigor. Scientists are still human beings. We are not exempt from the things that lead other humans astray.

This connected for me with something I'm studying around personalized medicine. The DOTS program — Directly Observed Therapy, Short-course was introduced to help TB treatment in low-income countries. It helps. But it's also a one-size-fits-all approach, and that rigidity has contributed to non-compliance and, in some cases, drug-resistant TB. Not because the science was bad. Because the implementation didn't account for the full human picture.

Where we are right now

Here's what makes this book urgent and not just historical: the problem is not solved. It is actively getting worse in some ways.

Drug-resistant TB — forms of the disease that no longer respond to standard antibiotics — remains a public health crisis.

Only about 2 in 5 people with drug-resistant TB accessed treatment in 2024. Research funding sits at US$1.2 billion annually against a target of US$5 billion. Nine countries already report failing TB drug supply chains.

And the pharmaceutical angle is real. Even when TB drugs could be produced and shipped more cheaply, they weren't. Governments couldn't afford the newer antibiotics.

There's an argument about wanting to prevent resistance, but the simpler truth John Green keeps returning to is: the fewer people with TB in the world, the less it spreads. The math is not complicated. The politics are.

Advanced countries have become complacent because TB largely doesn't affect their populations. Less research funding flows toward it. More profitable drug categories get the attention. This is the architecture of how a curable disease kills over a million people a year.

What this means for science communication

One of the things this book does brilliantly is something I think about a lot: how to make people care about something they feel is far away from them.

John Green is not a scientist. He is a storyteller. And the fact that he could take a pathogen, a history, a global health crisis and make me emotional about it on a Tuesday — is a lesson in what science communication can be when it's done well.

Numbers alone don't move people. Stories do. Henry's story moved me more than the statistic that TB is the leading infectious disease killer.

This is something I think about for my own path. The science is important. The rigor is important. But if we can't translate what we find into something that reaches people — especially people in communities like ours in the Caribbean who are often excluded from these conversations then the knowledge stays locked in a world that already had access to it.

My honest reflection

I'm a Jamaican student studying biotechnology in the UK. I have a BCG vaccine scar on my arm and I had never, before this book, spent real time thinking about tuberculosis as something relevant to my life or my work.

That is a privilege. A very specific, geography-based, passport-shaped privilege.

I can't choose where I was born. Neither could Henry. Neither could the woman in India who went to court for her right to medicine that already existed.

What I can choose is what I do with the knowledge once I have it.

This book has reignited something in me, a pull toward infectious disease, toward global health equity, toward asking who gets access to what we already know how to do.

It might become a research thread. It might become nothing more than a changed perspective. But I don't think I'll be able to look at a disease statistic the same way again.

These are people calling "Marco."

Someone should be answering.

Be Liv-Tastic 😊