A review by grumpyreading
Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

emotional informative inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

🦠 Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green 🦠

MY RATING: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Tuberculosis has haunted humanity for thousands of years—once romanticized, now recognized as a disease rooted in poverty and injustice. In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young TB patient in Sierra Leone, sparking a deep friendship and a commitment to advocacy. In Everything Is Tuberculosis, Green shares Henry’s story alongside the history and future of one of the world’s deadliest—but curable—diseases.

This book was great! I listened to the audiobook and I highly recommend doing the same. Hearing this narrated by John Green really made the story come through and I think made this a much more emotional book. John Green talked a lot about what leads to disease and widespread treatment and stigma. This book talked about about how diseases, including those that are controllable, become diseases of poverty, and how this cycle continues through issues like having no funding for food in hospitals, or requiring treatment be overseen by professionals causing people to leave their jobs, furthering spread in low-income places. John Green also talked about the romanticization of disease in white people and the contribution to beauty standards that this has, and how this shifts when diseases no longer impact mostly white people. He also talked about how the medical system and society act as though societal issues causing sickness and symptoms are painted as individual issues, dehumanizing patients and causing people to not value survival of those who are sick, and to not value their lives, which impacts allocation of global public health resources. 

While none of the information in this book was new to me, he described it in a very accessible way, and really humanized it through talking about individuals, especially Henry, and their stories. If only I get the anti-vaxxers to read this one and hear a bit more about public health and spread of diseases and what we can do to help mitigate in a system that doesn’t value healing for those who are marginalized. 
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