Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green

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⭐ 5/5 — Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green 🦠 “Who Knew TB Could Be This Riveting?”

👉 Buy Everything Is Tuberculosis on Amazon 🛍️ (affiliate link)

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⚠️ Trigger Warnings

This book contains:

• Illness (tuberculosis, Ebola)

• Child illness and death

• Medical neglect and lack of access to treatment

• Racism, ableism, gender and transgender discrimination

• Anti-gay bias

• Death of friends and family members

• Poverty and systemic injustice

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📝 Quick Take

Okay, let’s be honest — if you’d told me a book about tuberculosis would have me staying up way past my bedtime, I would’ve laughed. But here we are. 😅

John Green has somehow managed to make a medical history book read like a page-turning thriller. I have a distant family member who died of TB as a teen — long before I was born — and my dad talked about her often. Her story was marked by poverty, inaccessible treatment, and heartbreaking decisions. This book hit close to home.

Green blends Henry’s story (a modern-day TB patient) with deeply researched historical and cultural analysis. I couldn’t put it down. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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📚 Overview: Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green

Published in 2025, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection is a popular science book that examines how TB, a treatable disease, remains one of the world’s deadliest.

Green (yes, The Fault in Our Stars guy) uses a mix of medical history, personal narrative, and social commentary to illuminate how systemic injustice has kept TB alive and well in the 21st century.

His storytelling lens is Henry Reider, a teenager from Sierra Leone, whose journey through illness, treatment failures, and recovery is interwoven with centuries of human history and inequality.

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🚨 Spoiler Warning: Full Plot Summary Below 🚨

🧍‍♂️ Meet Henry Reider

Henry is a 17-year-old boy growing up in Sierra Leone. Diagnosed with TB later than he should’ve been, his treatment was interrupted by his father, who turned to faith healing. This lapse led to Henry developing a drug-resistant strain of TB.

His sister Favor is diagnosed with a tumor soon after — but tragically dies because their family can’t raise treatment funds in time. 💔

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🌍 Historical Context Interwoven

Green takes breaks from Henry’s story to trace TB’s cultural and medical history:

• Ancient beliefs framed TB as demonic possession or “imbalance of the humors.”

• 19th-century writers romanticized TB as a “civilized” disease while marginalizing people of color with the same symptoms.

• Germ theory shifted treatment to focus on sanitation and isolation, leading to the rise of sanatoriums and stigmatizing patients as “morally weak” if they didn’t recover.

• The mid-20th century saw the development of the RIPE protocol — a drug regimen that essentially cured TB — but access remained concentrated in wealthy nations.

Across these historical pivots, racism, colonialism, and classism shaped how TB spread and how society responded.

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🏥 Modern Medicine Meets Old Inequality

Henry’s care is interrupted again during the Ebola outbreak, which devastates Sierra Leone’s fragile healthcare system.

By the time he returns to treatment, his TB strain has evolved. Doctors at Lakka Government Hospital try the standard DOTS program (directly observed therapy short-course), but it fails. DOTS requires patients to bear huge burdens — time, travel, resources — which isn’t feasible for families like Henry’s.

His treatment shifts to a highly toxic injectable regimen, which causes him to lose hearing in one ear and ultimately doesn’t work.

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👨‍⚕️ Enter Dr. Girum & A Glimmer of Hope

Dr. Girum Tefera refuses to give up on Henry. With help from nonprofits, he pieces together an experimental treatment using drugs that pharmaceutical companies like Johnson & Johnson have kept expensive and out of reach through price gouging.

Henry’s father initially resists, even threatening the doctor, but Dr. Girum persuades him to let Henry try one last time. Over the course of a year, Henry slowly recovers.

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🦠 History’s Big Picture

Green uses Henry’s recovery to highlight vicious vs. virtuous cycles:

• Vicious cycles: Poverty, stigma, price gouging, lack of infrastructure — all of which keep TB entrenched.

• Virtuous cycles: Advocacy, access to medication, education, and community support that break the chain.

Henry’s story inspires broader changes in Sierra Leone’s treatment programs. He goes on to pursue education and become a global health advocate, using his experience to push for justice.

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✍️ Final Thoughts

John Green has written a book that’s equal parts heartbreaking, educational, and galvanizing. The way he intertwines Henry’s journey with centuries of human behavior, policy, and prejudice is genuinely masterful.

⭐ Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.
Who knew a book about TB would leave me both sobbing and fired up about global healthcare inequities? 🫁✨

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📚 If You Liked This, Try:

If you enjoy immersive nonfiction with heart and history, check out:

• 🦠 The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee — a sweeping history of cancer.

• 🌍 Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder — Paul Farmer’s fight against infectious disease in Haiti.

• ✍️ Turtles All the Way Down by John Green — fiction, but thematically linked through empathy and illness.