Author: John Green Publisher: Crash Course Book, 2025
BOOK REVIEW: Everything is Tuberculosis
Author: John Green Publisher: Crash Course Book, 2025
Review by John David Kolter, MD
In 2006, as a third-year resident, I delivered a Grand Rounds talk at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Virginia on tuberculosis. The topic was germane as the District of Columbia, just across the Potomac River, was shaking off the cobwebs of decades of urban blight, by way of suburban flight, with a relentless gentrification moving from west to east across the District. Despite this upwardly mobile socioeconomic march, the District of Columbia still reported, at the time, the highest case rate of tuberculosis in the country at 12.5 / 100,000 people and had only recently shed the distinction of having case rates higher than a number of developing countries worldwide. In my preparation, I was confronted with voluminous data on tuberculosis case rates, updated testing and case detection methodology, yet I still asked myself,“ Is tuberculosis really still a thing?” John Green, the author of the 2025 release Everything is Tuberculosis, admits that he asked himself the very same question while researching his latest book, despite the clear demonstration of this concept-of-being in recent World Health Organization tuberculosis case rate data. Mr. Green affirms in his book that tuberculosis is anything but a“ disease of history” and that the cultural consequences of tuberculosis remain practically unavoidable, irrespective of domicile.
A notable concept of tuberculosis, as with most infectious diseases, is that the disease burden and applicability to daily life depend a great deal on where in the world one resides. The impetus for writing Everything is Tuberculosis developed after a chance meeting between Mr. Green and Henry, a gregarious young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. Mr. Green was in Sierra Leone ostensibly to study global maternal mortality and the country’ s maternal and neonatal health systems. However, Henry, sharing the same name as Mr. Green’ s son, conveyed an outsize presence of positivity in an otherwise grim environment and awakened Mr. Green’ s curiosity with his remarkable
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