Name: Everything Is Tuberculosis
ISBN: 9781529961447

Everything Is Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity 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 became 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 inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year. In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.

What Hacker News says

thciprianiDec 2025

Same with Ezra Kline's "Abundance" vs. John Green's "An Abundance of Katherines." But I kinda like swapping in John Green—"Everything is Tuberculosis" was a good read for me this year.

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ZeroConcernsSep 2025

So, for those interested in things like this, I can highly recommend John Green's recent "Everything is Tuberculosis." I bought it due to enjoying "the Anthropocene Reviewed", and... struggled with it, as this is a thoroughly depressing subject, but making it through the book was an educational experience, which I rate 4 out of 5 stars.

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tialaramexFeb 2026

Have you noticed you don't have Guinea Worms where you live?

It's trivial to not have this problem, the fact that a relatively large fraction of the world's population needed intervention to fix this is an indictment on our collective will.

You may have read, or at least heard about John Green's book "Everything is Tuberculosis". Treating TB is, by comparison to Guinea Worm, really hard. When medics tell John that - all being equal - nobody should die of TB because we could just fix it, they mean with like a hospital full of doctors to diagnose and prescribe treatment, pharmaceutical companies to make the drugs, stuff that looks like technology to you.

To eradicate Guinea Worm Disease you need basic clean water. I'm not talking "Wait, does this tap water meet current national standards for UV treatment?" clean water, I'm talking like, "don't drink directly out of the village pond" clean water. That's really what it takes for this to just go away on its own. The interventions are because crazily in 2026 large numbers of humans do not have ready access to clean drinking water.

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tialaramexJan 2026

I mean, this is a recurring theme of John Green's "Everything is Tuberculosis"

TB is "just" a bacterial infection. Today, in a wealthy industrialized country with universal healthcare, if I caught TB they'd "just" cure it here. Cures are possible, often even relatively easy.

But all three of the famous Bronte sisters probably died from it (TB == "consumption"), not far from where my mother lives today in that same industrialized country. And most years today it is still the leading cause of infectious disease deaths because even though we could cure it we just leave poor people to die instead.

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chistevDec 2025

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black.

Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker..

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Greene.

Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen..

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy D. Snyder.

Animal Farm by George Orwell.. (a re-read)

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

1984 by George Orwell. (a re-read)

Night by Elie Wiesel..

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.. (a re-read)