Tuberculosis

Tell me what you think of when you hear the name John Green. Most probably his novel The Fault in Our Stars, which has sold more than 23 million copies worldwide. 

I'll tell you what I think of: a boy with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. His name is Henry. He lives in Sierra Leone, and has got open sores in his neck and shoulder from ruptured lymph nodes, yellow clouds in the white of his eyes – a byproduct of the liver toxicity from the not-too-effective treatment he was on. 

John Green writes books other than novels. His non-fiction Everything is Tuberculosis tells the story of meeting Henry, a charismatic teenager who was nearly killed by the same disease which claimed the lives of John Keats, Franz Kafka, and Henry David Thoreau.

It has taken four years for Henry to be able to get home. During his hospital stay, he was emaciated and could hardly attend school. Why did it take so long for Henry to be accurately diagnosed? Why did he get worse in hospital? John Green captures the trajectory of a disease that continues to kill over a million people every year. Among them, many could not afford the pills. For those who could, they abandoned the pills because the pills made them terribly sick when taken without food, which they could not afford.

John Green came to the inescapable conclusion that the root cause of tuberculosis is injustice. Depressing as it is to utter word injustice, I do believe he is right.