Everything Is Tuberculosis

John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’ s deadliest disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with hu­ manity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John be­ came fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequi­ ties that allow this curable, preventable infec­ tious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.

In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’ s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world— and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.