I’ve never read anything from John Green but I used to watch his YouTube channel. As a young adult fiction author; I felt his handling of such a broad and complex topic, like the history of tuberculosis and it’s impacts on the world today would be both engaging and digestable. I was not wrong in this assumption. This book was fast even by quick read standards, I could have read another two or three volumns but I think Green was able to say what he wanted to: Tuberculuosis is not an archaic/cured disease it still impacts hundreds of millions of people who are for the most part neglected due to their poverty and or race. There is hope for the future but only if people speak up and speak out advocating both for themselves (Green points to several activists in both India and Sierra Leone) and others as we all must.
Some quotes and ideas that stayed with me:
“Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me to be a mistake… biology has no moral compass it does not punish the evil and reward the good, it doesn’t even know about evil and good. Stigma is a way of saying ‘you deserve to have this happen’ but implied within the stigma is also ‘and I don’t deserve it so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me’“.
“There are many acronyms within the field of tuberculosis global health, like any field, loves to shorten its phrases to make them obvious to experts and inaccessable to neophites.
TB has always been racially charged, first it was seen as a disease of sophisication and as such those of “darker skin” could not get it; then with industrialization it became known as a disease of the poor and has since been used, infurieatingly, as proof of white racial superiority. This is ancient history; in my life time:
- J&J actively priced third world health systems out of bedaquiline - unconscionable!
- In 2001 the head of USAid insinuated that HIV medicines couldn’t be distributed to Africa because: “Africans don’t know what watches and clocks are… when you say ‘take it at ten o’clock’ people will say ‘what do you mean by ten o’clock’” 🤯
- Between the mid-1980s the mid 2000s the commingling of tuberculuosis and HIV led to more deaths than the combined fatalities of WWI and WII combined!
Ending the post with a positive quote toward the end of the book: “Mere dispare never tells the whole human story, as much as dispare would like to insist otherwise. Hopelessness has the insdious talent of explaining everything; the reason that x or y sucks is that everything sucks. The reason your misearble is that misery is the correct response to the world as we find it and so on. I am prone to dispare so I know it’s powerful vdespairoice, it just doesn’t happen to be true. Here’s the truth as I see it; vicious cycles are common, injustice and unfairness permeate every aspect of human life, but virtous cycles are also possible.”