Tuberculosis (TB) is the deadliest infectious disease in history, having caused more than 1 billion deaths over the past 200 years. It is currently the leading infectious killer globally, recently surpassing COVID-19 to regain this status. TB has plagued humanity for thousands of years.
And yet, it is a preventable and curable disease. Most cases of active TB can be successfully treated and cured with a standard course of antibiotics. Tuberculosis death isn’t really caused by the bacteria anymore but by social determinants of health. Something should be done.
That’s from “Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection,” a March 2025 book by American author, novelist and Youtuber John Green. It is short, charming, insightful and harrowing. I recommend reading, and joining his cause.
“The real cause of contemporary tuberculosis is, for lack of a better term, us,” he writes. “So we have entered a strange era of human history: a preventable, curable infectious disease remains are deadliest. That’s the world we are currently choosing.”
Below are my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- 1 in 3 of have had the bacterium bactria tuberculosis but it lies dormant for most, though weakened immune system lets it become active TB
- Like Ugandan Dr. Peter Mugyenyi said of HIV in 2000: the disease is where the cure is not and the cure is where the disease is not
- As a friend told the author: “nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past”
- Robert Penn Warren: west is where we all plan to go someday
- John B Stetson had consumption, traveled west to cure his lungs but only got to Missouri where he decided to improve upon hats and when he returned he made his cowboy hat (In Philadelphia!)
- New Mexico wooed tuberculosis patients to get more white residents, 10% of population had tuberculosis in 1910 and it worked, getting statehood in 1912
- Several assassins involved in the 1914 plot to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand, including Gavrilo Princip, were suffering from active tuberculosis. Knowing their lives were already short and Doomed by the illness, these young men were more willing to risk death, often carrying suicide capsules for after the act.
- Sierra Leone railroads were built to extract mineral wealth, not to connect people
- TB was in the Americas and afroeurasia before 1492, likely brought by seals
- The trope of spiting blood into a rag is from TB, which is best known for being in the lungs but can show up elsewhere — the hunchback of Notre Dame had Pott’s disease, tb of the spine
- Ophelia Dahl of Partners in Health on ebola hitting Sierra Leon: acute on chronic
- Susan Sontag: “nothing is more punitive than to give a disease meaning”
- Tuberculosis became associated with creatives (because it affected so many people, no wonder Keats, The Brontee sisters, likely Edgar Allen Poe and other celebrities died of it). And it was unusual to effect the young (otherwise children and elderly died, not mid life)
- Also became associated with beauty (thin and pale), in part because it affected so many you couldn’t easily say it was morality
- Transitioned from inherited disease of artists to an infectious disease of poverty — because urban industrialization. And racism put more malnourished people closer together
- Sanatoriums , and whole dedicated cities like Pasadena and Colorado Springs for tuberculosis
- The Adirondack chair was for TB patients
- Pasteur outdid Koch discovery of TB bacteria
- Dr. Alan L. Hart (1890–1962) was a pioneering American physician, radiologist, and one of the first documented transgender men in the US to undergo gender-affirming surgery (1917). He revolutionized tuberculosis (TB) detection by pioneering the use of chest X-ray photography for early diagnosis, saving thousands of lives through TB screening programs in the 1930s-40s.
- Between 1985-2005, the same number of people died of TB as died in both World Wars combined
- TB death isn’t really caused by the bacteria anymore but by social determinants of health
- “The real cause of contemporary tuberculosis is, for lack of a better term, us… and so we have entered a strange era of human history: a preventable, curable infectious disease remains are deadliest. That’s the world we are currently choosing.”
- Called “the captain of all these men of death”