As it turns out, Everything is Tuberculosis

I saw John Green on CBS Mornings a few weeks ago. He spoke about his non-fiction book “Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection.” Green, I thought, is that guy who writes teen books with quirky titles such as “The Fault is in Our Stars” and “Turtles All the Way Down?” What would this guy know about a deadly bacterium? A lot, it turns out, and he’s written a short and engaging book about it.

We experienced TB on the Irish immigrant side of our family, with Great Aunt Molly dying from TB in the 1920s. The other side of the family fled the Potato Famine and I assume some carried TB with them as some died young. I had asthma as a kid as did my sister Molly who would turn blue before my mother the nurse could give her an injection. She’s fine now, getting along in years which is what we all expect to do. I remember asthma attacks before inhalers and miracle drugs. Panic sets in when you can’t breathe and that just adds to the problem. People die from severe asthma attacks. It’s always called an attack, whether from alliteration or from sudden onset. You don’t hear much about Pneumonia Attacks or even TB Attacks.

The thing about TB that I didn’t know is that it is a slow killer. Untreated, it consumes patients from the inside, thus “Consumption.” That’s part of the problem. TB bacteria sneak in and it can be far along before diagnosed. Even when diagnosed, drug treatments are expensive and often unavailable in developing countries. So USAID was (must use past-tense now that we dwell in Trumpistan) an important agency for TB patients in Sierra Leone and other West African nations.

That’s where Green takes us, into the life of Henry Reider, a kid so riven with TB that Green thought he was 8 years old and not 13. I explore Green’s book along with some literary history (John Keats and “Bright Star”) and how the Rocky Mountain West became the country’s TB treatment zone. Read on.