On the copyright page of John Green’s newest book sits a footnote explaining the choice of typeface. The reason, it turns out, is tuberculosis. Everything is. The joke sets the tone for Everything Is Tuberculosis, a nonfiction work of about 200 pages published in 2025, whose subtitle names tuberculosis as our deadliest infection and leaves little doubt about the thesis.
Green, the novelist and YouTuber, argues that TB should be treated as public enemy number one. No other infection kills more people, a long-standing rank that COVID-19 interrupted only briefly. A World Health Organization report, as the Associated Press summarized it, counted over 8 million people infected in one year and about 1.25 million dead. A columnist at Inside Higher Ed, reviewing the book, puts the figures at 11 million infected and 1.25 million killed each year, and adds that across history the disease has claimed over a billion lives, a toll above malaria, the plague or smallpox.
A cure that cannot get where it is needed
The oddity is that TB can be cured, and prevented. So why does it kill? Green’s answer is about people and money rather than microbes. The burden of disease and death falls almost entirely on the world’s poor, the Inside Higher Ed columnist notes, and accurate diagnostic tests and effective drugs are still priced far beyond the reach of poorer countries. Green puts it in a line that reviewers keep quoting: “The cure is where the disease is not and the disease is where the cure is not.”
In the United States, reported cases stay below 10,000 a year, and treatment works. That is the comfortable view from a rich country. The book keeps pulling the reader elsewhere.
It does so through individual lives. The AP reviewer singles out Shreya Tripathi, a TB activist who took the Indian government to court to get the drugs that could have saved her, which came too slowly. Green also sets the struggles of patients in Sierra Leone, who may find it hard to reach a clinic or to afford enough food to take their pills without getting sick, beside his own. On the subject of “patient noncompliance,” he discloses his own diagnoses and his wrestling with prescriptions. Side effects and the stigma of illness, the review observes, push people off treatment everywhere, whatever their access.
History, fashion and a question
The chapters wander from TB’s mark on fashion and history to the inequities that keep it alive. They take in, too, the era when the illness was romanticized as the badge of soulful poets and delicate beauty. IndyStar says the book follows tuberculosis through the story of one patient. It sits beside Green’s earlier nonfiction collection, The Anthropocene Reviewed, from 2021, and grew out of his campaigning on global health.
The AP reviewer calls it hopeful all the same. Green weighs the cycles, vicious and virtuous, that brought us here and leaves a question hanging: which kind will we build? As he writes, “We can do and be so much for each other, but only when we see one another in our full humanity.”
Sources
- John Green is obsessed with tuberculosis. He makes a strong case that we should be, too
- “Everything Is Tuberculosis” Would Be a Great Online Course
- 5 things to know about Indianapolis author John Green
