When you think of tuberculosis, it's easy to cast your mind back in time, to the kings and queens of England or the Satines and Fantines of fictional French history.
But in reality, TB continues to kill more people — about 1.5 million — around the globe each year than any other infectious disease, despite being completely treatable. And John Green wants you to pay attention.
The author, famous for his works of fiction like The Fault in Our Stars and Looking for Alaska, is coming out with a nonfiction book, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, March 18. He'll visit Iowa City on his sold-out book tour March 22.
"I think if you told me in 2019 that my next book was going to be about tuberculosis, I would have told you, 'Is that still a thing?' But unfortunately, it is still very much a thing," Green said on IPR's Talk of Iowa.
Green was inspired to write the book after visiting a TB hospital in 2019 and meeting a young boy there named Henry, who was fighting the disease.
"I could have very, very easily written a book about malaria or typhoid or cholera or HIV — all of these are diseases that walk the paths of injustice that we blazed for them — but I chose tuberculosis because of Henry, because there's a person I care about who lived with this disease, and his story moved me, his family's story moved me, and I wanted to honor the generosity that he showed me in sharing his story with me by sharing it with others."
He's since advocated for awareness and understanding of the disease, which, while generally curable, is harder to receive treatment for in impoverished communities. Recent changes in public health are only widening the gap to access. Just last week, global nonprofits reported losing critical funding from USAID that was being used to research and fight the disease.
But Green believes in the value of attention and the importance of turning it to the needs of "the most vulnerable and marginalized people among us."
"We solve the problems we pay attention to," he said. "The more attention we pay to problems, the more likely we are to solve them. Tuberculosis is just a resource problem. There are so many problems in this world we don't know how to solve that are complex that require lots of innovation, and we certainly need new tools in the fight against tuberculosis, but we have great tools. What we don't have is the political will to implement those tools, to really have a coordinated, global response to the TB crisis."
To hear this conversation, listen to Talk of Iowa, hosted by Charity Nebbe. Dani Gehr produced this episode.
