Everything is Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis has been entwined with hu­manity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John be­came fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequi­ties that allow this curable, preventable infec­tious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.

In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection is a book by American author John Green about tuberculosis, a curable disease usually brought on by the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis that is the leading cause of death from an infectious disease. The book argues that the disease is no longer primarily caused by the bacteria, but instead by human choices. It was published on March 18, 2025, and is Green's second nonfiction book. The book was well received and became a New York Times number one bestseller in nonfiction.