Dreamland Staff Picks by Jessica Bamford

John Green self-deprecatingly admits that during his research for this book, he became so fixated on the topic of tuberculosis (TB) that he could talk about little else in his social interactions. At parties, he was full of did-you-knows about this deadly disease. Fair warning: you may also be in danger of making this topic your whole personality for a while after reading “Everything is Tuberculosis.”

The story of this disease is fascinating, frustrating and infuriating. 

Did you know that New Mexico gained statehood largely because of its status as a destination for tuberculosis treatment?

Did you know several cities in the United States exist because they grew around sanatoriums?

Did you know that the cowboy hat was invented because of tuberculosis?

These are all “fun facts,” good for entertaining your friends. But Green didn’t write this book to provide readers with trivia of a trivial nature. While he covers the fascinating history of this disease and its changing perception in society — from romanticized to stigmatized — he really wrote this book as a call to action.

Because… Did you know that we have had a cure for tuberculosis (antibiotics) for nearly 80 years and in that time, millions of people have continued to die every year (approximately 150 million in total), mostly in impoverished countries, because the drugs required to treat TB effectively are prohibitively expensive?

These medications are easily accessible in the United States and other developed nations, where TB is largely a disease of the past. But they are incredibly difficult to access in the nations where tuberculosis runs rampant.

Green paints the picture for us of this life-and-death disparity the same way he learned about it — through the story of a young man he met in Sierra Leone, Henry. Henry spent most of his childhood in a hospital, alienated from friends and family and suffering from the side effects of drugs which did little to improve his tuberculosis symptoms, but did leave him deaf in one ear (some of the medications used to treat TB have incredibly harsh side effects). This yearslong battle was the result of an inefficient guessing game of antibiotics to treat a condition that would have been cured in a matter of months in the United States, thanks to more accurate diagnostic tools and more effective medications.

Green argues that this all boils down to humanity’s choice of where to allocate resources — what kinds of medical research we incentivize and how we patent life-saving drugs to protect profit margins. But, he points out, allowing tuberculosis to continue to thrive in parts of the world is a danger to us all. This disease has been around for all of human history, is responsible for millions of deaths, and continues to evolve drug resistance that makes it harder to treat and cure. It is in our best interest and within our power to take a global approach to identifying, treating and preventing the spread of tuberculosis.

While this is a heavy topic, Green writes in an accessible way and sprinkles so many interesting facts about TB’s lasting effects on all aspects of society — on everything from language and literature and fashion to the outcome of wars that shaped our global politics — that this short book is a page-turner.