For John Green it is tuberculosis to the end

Nolen: The first TB patient with whom I sat down in Nairobi was a man who had a detailed drug-resistant tuberculosis or XDR-TB-in essential there is only a very slim chance that the only drugs we know actually heal him. We no longer have options. And he had come that day when he was very optimistic every day every day to pick up his delamanides. And it was not in stock.

Green: Oh my God.

Nolen: And I was just like: “This is terrible for her, Barack. It’s terrible for your wife and five children.” They had all been scrolled, and so far they were all TB-free. But like so many people, he had become bankrupt from his infection. He had to send his wife and children back to the village because he didn’t have to afford to keep her in the city.

XDR-TB is terrifying for him and his family and everyone who takes care of him. But it is also scary for the rest of us that this man goes to this clinic every day and then back to this apartment building, in which he lives with 500 other people in Wangen to Jowl, with TB, which he can no longer treat. This is very, very bad for him. But it is also very, very bad for everyone else.

Green: Yes. I think it is important to understand that this is a tragedy on an individual level, at hundreds of thousands of individual levels, but it is – I don’t know how I sometimes feel about the expression “global health” because I think it sounds like we are only talking about health in impoverished communities. The truth is that this is a crisis for human health for people everywhere. One person was exposed to an antibiotic that hopefully worked. And then your infection has the possibility of developing resistance to this medicine due to an inventory that the United States government has caused, in addition to so many other medication.

We could easily land in a situation in which we have no tools to combat tuberculosis. And that brings us back to the early 20th century. It attributes us when my big uncle died of tuberculosis at the age of 29. He worked as a Lineman at Alabama Power and Light. His father was a doctor, and there was absolutely nothing his father or any other could do to save his life.

Nolen: Does anyone in the United States still degenerate?

Green: Yes, we will have about 10,000 cases of active tuberculosis in the United States in the United States this year. In fact, the tuberculosis rate in the USA increases.

Nolen: Why?

Green: We underfunded systems for public health and also do a terrible job to bring healing to the places where healing is needed.

Nolen: In the past, they said that we know exactly how to live in a world without tuberculosis, but we choose. In your opinion, why were we so happy to live in this world?