Corporate Greed And Racism = TB

by Fran Withrow 05.2025

I began reading “Everything is Tuberculosis” because I was curious. Isn’t tuberculosis a disease of the past? (Oh wait; I thought that about measles too…silly me. But I digress.) 

Alas, author John Green says tuberculosis is indeed alive and well. Formerly known as phthisis and consumption, it is a frightening disease of the lungs. Those who contract it cough, run a fever, and watch as their bodies slowly waste away. Tuberculosis is sneaky: it can lie dormant for years, then roar to life, or never cause symptoms at all. It can affect not only the lungs but also other body parts like the lymph nodes and spine. As recently as 1930, people in the U.S. were still dying of this insidious disease, yet today, in America, we no longer fear it as we once did. With the advent of antibiotics and other treatments, most people here don’t even think about TB anymore.

However, in 2023, post-Covid, TB was listed as the world’s deadliest infectious disease, killing over a million people. How can this be?  

The answer, according to Green, is that though we can now cure TB, the nations who “have the cure do not have the disease, and those who have the disease do not have the cure.” 

Green bases his book around the charming Henry, a young boy he met in Sierra Leone. Green developed a deep relationship with Henry, who looked much younger than his seventeen years due to malnutrition and drug-resistant tuberculosis. Henry might have been a withdrawn, depressed teenager; instead, he exuded joy and was a staff favorite of the hospital where he struggled to get well.

The challenge in healing patients like Henry is linked to racism, corporate greed, malnutrition, and stigma. Poorer countries are less likely to have the funds to diagnose people correctly and in a timely manner. Medication can make a patient terribly ill if not taken with food, and people who cannot afford food stop taking their meds. Henry’s mother struggled to pay for his medications as his disease dragged on and on. This, too: the original TB medications are now over fifty years old, so drug-resistant TB is on the rise.

Add in the pharmaceutical industry, which fights generic versions of its drugs, making treatment too expensive for some countries, and you have the recipe for a potential world-wide pandemic.

Despite the subject matter, Green’s book teems with courage and resilience, and even a few surprises. Check it out to find out how tuberculosis was a minor cause of World War I, helped give Americans the cowboy hat, and aided New Mexico in becoming a state.

Green says TB is an illness of poverty and injustice. But he also notes we are at a crossroads: we can choose to address the injustice, poverty, and lack of health care that cause such suffering. Or we can continue down the road we are on, where TB continues to kill, and we continue to turn a blind eye. In light of our current presidential administration, I’m not holding my breath.