This is an interesting, short read written by John Green. John writes about the many ways in which tuberculosis has shaped history. Some cultures romanticized the disease while others stigmatized it. In much of Europe, the pale skin, rosy cheeks, sunken eyes, and thinness associated with women suffering from and dying from tuberculosis became the beauty standard. It was thought that tuberculosis was inherited and impacted intelligent, talented people more, enriching the soul while harming the physical body. I guess with so many people dying from the disease, romanticizing it likely helped people more easily accept illness and the deaths of their loved ones. Other places like China and southern Europe had long believed that the disease was infectious. As a result of people avoiding contact with infected, sick people, tuberculosis cases were much rarer.
As quality of life improved in the United States and Europe in the late 1800s, tuberculosis cases dropped. Mostly just the poor, who were more likely to live and work in crowded corridors, continued getting sick. Tuberculosis was no longer romanticized and was instead looked down upon. It was previously argued that black Americans could not get tuberculosis due to their inferiority. Once it was discovered that bacteria causes tuberculosis in 1882, it was then argued that the high rate of tuberculosis among black people was due to their inferiority. In residential schools that indigenous people in Canada were forced into, 8% of all kids died of tuberculosis each year in the 1930s and 1940s. This is truly crazy.
Today tuberculosis is curable. Around one quarter of adults are infected with tuberculosis, but less than 10% of these people ever get actively ill from it. Malnourishment weakens the immune system, making people in poorer countries much more likely to get sick from tuberculosis. Sadly, effective medicine is often unavailable for patients in these countries, causing around 1.2 million people to die from tuberculosis each year.
A lot of deaths could be preventable if profit earnings and patent use by pharmaceutical companies was limited. The system should definitely not be such that these companies are making more money in return for more deaths in poor countries. I don’t know what good alternative systems are, but the incentives definitely need to change.
Reading the stories of patients in Sierra Leone made me feel disheartened and guilty. If I get sick, I can count on receiving great care, regardless of the cost. People in poorer countries, on the other hand, often pass away due to lack of a few thousand dollars for medicine or a medical procedure. Many tuberculosis patients lose their hearing as a side effect of the medicine taken. Yet there is a more effective medicine that doesn’t cause hearing loss that is available at a higher cost. I can’t imagine being told that I have to take medicine that is far less effective and that will likely make me deaf because of its lower cost. And who is to say that my hearing or my life is worth more than someone’s in Sierra Leone?
I’ll leave you with a couple nice quotes from John.
“We can do and be so much for each other—but only when we see one another in our full humanity, not as statistics or problems, but as people who deserve to be alive in the world.”
“A preventable, curable infectious disease remains our deadliest. That’s the world we are currently choosing.”