Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

I was interested in reading this book because my maternal grandmother lived in a sanitorium for five years with Tuberculosis. Since she was ill, and my grandfather was in the Air Force, my mother had to live in a Boarding House in Colorado for five years of her childhood. (They were from Texas.) I have also spent the last 30+ years working in social services and one thing I never understood was why our service recipients (living in our group homes) had to be tested for TB at their annual physicals when I thought that TB was a thing of the past. I mean, how many people do you know come down with TB these days?

This book was eye-opening for sure. John Green, whose fiction books I really like, does a thorough job of explaining what TB is, how thoughts about it has changed over the century, and why it may never really leave us, unless someone decides to put some money into truly finding a cure for it, or at least a cost-effective treatment. He also explains that it's a systemic problem as well, not just a medical problem.

TB was known as "Consumption" in the early 1900s. In the early days, having TB was romanticized because of the people stricken with it: artists, poets, wealthy white people. People with TB had a certain "look" about them, a result of the illness, that people seemed to admire and almost strive for. Pale complexion, big eyes. I always think of the movie Moulin Rouge starring Nicole Kidman. She was beautiful, but obviously ill. TB is incredibly contagious, which is interesting that the movie doesn't acknowledge that! Then, when TB spread rapidly within other populations because of close quarters brought on by poverty, perceptions of this disease shifted and people started referring to it as a poor man's disease.

What interested me the most about all of this is why this dangerous, contagious disease may never be eradicated, in my life time at least. First of all, the treatment is long: several months of a daily "cocktail" of medications, similar to HIV treatment. Not only considering the cost of this, the steadfastness and consistency for taking this daily cocktail would be difficult for the best of us. I can't even remember to take my cholesterol med daily. Many people don't finish a 7-day antibiotic after they start feeling better, even though they are told the importance of finishing it. What happens when people start and stop taking the TB cocktail is that their body has time to build up a resistance to the cocktail, so then it stops working. 

This is a curable and preventable contagious disease that continues to kill more than a million people each year. I guess my grandmother, who got TB back in the late 1940s-early 1950s, was one of the lucky ones.

Wendy's Rating: ****