Why would a disease that medicine can cure still kill more than a million people every year? John Green has an answer, and it is not about bacteria. His book “Everything Is Tuberculosis” came out on March 18, 2025, and argues that the infection persists only because people allow it to.
The numbers behind the argument are blunt. An AP reviewer, citing a recent World Health Organization report, noted that TB infected over 8 million people in a single year and killed about 1.25 million. Apart from a brief stretch when COVID-19 took the lead, it is the top infectious killer of humans. And yet, as Green lays out, TB is curable and even preventable. Intriguingly, that gap between what medicine can do and what happens in practice is the whole subject of the book.
A boy named Henry
Green did not start with statistics. In 2019 he visited Sierra Leone with Partners In Health and met Henry, a young TB patient who shares his son’s name. Henry’s story runs through the book, set beside the history of how people have responded to the disease. Green told NPR’s Robin Young that it was partly Henry who inspired him. The two also talked about TB in Green’s own family history.
That visit changed how Green saw it. He came away convinced that TB was not “a problem of the past” but an ongoing global issue. He spent years talking to experts and addressed the United Nations on the subject in 2023. That same year he asked his audience to petition Johnson & Johnson and Cepheid to widen access to bedaquiline, a TB drug, and to rapid testing for multidrug-resistant TB. Both companies agreed.
How the argument works
The book moves between topics. It covers what TB did to history and fashion, the long habit of romanticising the illness as the mark of soulful poets and delicate beauty, and the economic inequality that keeps the disease alive today. The AP reviewer described Green’s method as using the lives of real people to make overwhelming problems feel personal.
One example is medication. When he writes about so-called patient noncompliance, Green discloses his own diagnoses and his struggles to take prescriptions. Then he sets that against patients in Sierra Leone, who may not be able to reach a clinic or afford enough food to take the pills without getting sick. Some difficulties, such as side effects and stigma, are shared by both. Another is Shreya Tripathi, an activist who had to sue the Indian government to get the drugs that would have saved her had they not taken so long to arrive.
NPR’s Rachel Martin summed up the thesis as a nonfiction account of the world’s deadliest disease and how simple it would be to wipe it out “if societies just made it a priority.”
A publishing event
The book was released by Crash Course Books, a new imprint of Penguin Young Readers. The first printing was announced at 500,000 copies, and Green signed 100,000 of them. He also narrated the audiobook.
It is not a gloomy read, the AP review said. Green keeps a note in his wallet reminding him that the year he finished high school, 12 million children under five died, while last year fewer than 5 million did. Hope, he told NPR, is the right response to the human condition.
Sources
- Book Review: John Green is obsessed with tuberculosis. He makes a strong case that we should be, too (Associated Press book review)
- In 'Everything Is Tuberculosis,' John Green turns his attention to a deadly disease (NPR's Book of the Day)
- John Green cherishes life by writing about death (NPR, Wild Card, Rachel Martin)
