Author John Green has been obsessed with tuberculosis (TB) since 2019, when he first visited Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone and met a young TB patient named Henry Reider. In his latest book Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection (Crash Course Books, 2025), Green explores the history of the bacterial disease, highlighting its impact in different eras of history. And he calls attention to the present reality of TB, a curable disease that nonetheless kills over a million people each year due to stark health care inequities around the globe.
In this day and age, Green argues that injustice is the root cause of TB cases and deaths, and that we can collectively choose to correct that injustice and finally snuff out the deadly disease.
