Everything is Tuberculosis

I saw someone reading this on Mastodon and it sounded interesting (and later found someone else reading the same book so it’s obviously a book of the moment, in obscure corners at least). It was indeed right up my street. It’s entirely about tuberculosis but also about a whole stack of other things at the same time. The title’s not as hyperbolic as you feel it might be. The author does a decent job of showing that there’s not much in human existence that hasn’t been touched by the disease. Even if you were vaccinated against it as a child (as I was) and you’ve never knowingly known anyone with it, tuberculosis has shaped the society you live in, our history and geography and culture would all have taken different paths without it.

The bit that came as a surprise to me was how much of this isn’t down to medicine. That tuberculosis still rages in much of the world despite it feeling pretty much eradicated to me here in the first world is alarming, but I expected that bit. Something that I didn’t realise is how much of a stigma is attached to the disease still. The testimony of people who’d rather have died than have to live with the shame of being a tuberculosis survivor blows my mind. That one of the problems with getting the cure to people is that they are cast out of their families into poverty makes even the “rest and nutrition” bit that plays a part in pretty much any disease cure all the more complicated. I expected to read about failures of administrative policies or supply lines or the insertion of racism into medical strategies and those can’t shock me but an abject lack of humanity apparently still can. And yes, some of that is because there’s an idea in the back of my mind that consumption is the disease that takes all the cool young poets and who wouldn’t want to be in that clique? The correlation of culture and contagion is weird.

It’s a very easy to read book. The author weaves through it the story of Henry Reider, a teenager suffering from tuberculosis who he met at a hospital in Sierra Leone, and Henry’s story gives the book a focus when the numbers get too big to handle (1.3 million people a year still die from TB; 1 in 7 people who’ve ever lived were killed by TB). It’s not a long academic book, and there’s no long references and footnotes section but those are something I always enjoy so the absence was noted. I stopped reading numerous times to go and search online for something that was mentioned in passing, but really I’m quite happy with that. There are suggestions for further reading at the back where the author acknowledges some of his major sources.

In the end (and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to spoil a non-fiction book like this!) the author concludes that tuberculosis today is as much a disease of society as anything else. No one should be dying of a curable disease and the reasons that they still do are down to how society works. It’s not a surprising conclusion though really it ought to be. I learnt a lot.