I Am Tuberculosis

A book review and personal story.

I’ll read anything John Green writes—even a book about tuberculosis. But for me, unlike most readers in the United States, John Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis hits very close to home. Most people, like John Green when he first started learning about tuberculosis (TB), don’t realize that TB is – in this present moment – the world's deadliest infectious disease (Green 2025). They would be surprised, like he was, to find out that TB is “still a thing.” I, however, am very aware that it is still a thing because I was diagnosed with latent TB in 2014.

Latent TB, unlike active TB, is not contagious and not dangerous to the person who is infected, at least not yet. Latent TB is when a person has a small number of TB bacteria in their body that are alive but inactive. The TB might stay inactive forever without the infected person ever knowing it is there. The risk is that an illness or condition that weakens the immune system can activate the dormant TB bacteria, such as AIDS, diabetes, cancer, malnutrition or substance abuse, to name a few. It is estimated that about 13 million people in the United States have latent TB without knowing it. On the other end of the TB spectrum, active TB can be a horrible and painful disease which if left untreated, can lead to respiratory failure, major lung bleeding, and even drowning in one's own blood (Green 2025).

As a teacher, I have had a TB test each time I have transitioned to a new school district as part of the onboarding process. Teachers are only tested for TB once when entering a new district; after that, no retesting is required. When I returned to teaching in 2010 after having my second child, I was lucky to be hired back in my first district, but as I had been out for five years, and was considered a “new hire,” I was required to take another TB test, which was negative, as expected.

Three and half years later, at the end of 2013, I took a job in a district closer to where I live in Jersey City, NJ and I had to, of course, take another TB test. But this time, it was positive. I still think about how and when I was exposed to TB during this three and half year time period. After my positive test, my husband and children were also tested, but their results were negative. So it was just me who had been exposed. You can only get infected by breathing in TB germs that a person coughs into the air. When was I near a person who was coughing up active TB bacteria for long enough to be infected? So it still remains a great mystery to me how I was exposed. Interestingly, my father was treated for latent TB 25 years ago, but he also had traveled to a number of countries where rates of TB were higher and suspects that is how he was exposed.

My treatment was a course of two drugs that I took daily for 9 months. Of course this also corresponded with starting a new, quite stressful, teaching position. My thinking felt fuzzy at times and I didn’t know if I was feeling overwhelmed by my new job or the meds or both. It wasn’t ideal, and there were times that I wished I could stop taking the medication. One night I was complaining about my meds to a good friend and sharing my recent diagnosis, when her eyes began to tear up. She shared with me that her brother had died from TB while living in Turkey and asked me to please continue and finish my treatment. Again, I don’t think I realized until that moment that tuberculosis was really “still a thing” but my friend and her tragic family loss certainly put things in perspective for me. Who was I to complain about a 9 month course of drugs that could save my life, especially when I now know someone who I love had lost someone they love to this disease. I took every pill prescribed.

So when I picked up John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis, it felt personal. And although I know more than most people about latent TB, and even knowing about my friend’s loss of her brother to TB, I didn’t really know or understand the prevalence of active TB outside of the US. I didn’t know that it remains the world’s deadliest infectious disease despite the fact that “tuberculosis is curable, and has been since the mid-1950s” (Green 2025). This was shocking. And the disturbing and yet depressingly unsurprising assessment that John Green makes is that this deadly situation is due to our inability as humans to allocate resources where they need to go.

The places that have the medications for treating and curing TB have the lowest rates of TB and the places that have the highest rates of TB do not have adequate access to the necessary treatments due to poverty, inequality, racism and injustice. John Green’s disheartening conclusion is that due to the immoral misallocation of resources that could save lives, humans are the root cause of tuberculosis and we have an ethical and moral obligation to “also be the cure.” I urge everyone to read Everything is Tuberculous as part of this ethical and moral obligation, and not turn a blind eye to suffering in the world that should and can be stopped.

Resources:

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green (2025)

https://www.cdc.gov/tb/hcp/clinical-overview/latent-tuberculosis-infection.htm

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