Kelsey Widner > Recent Status Updates

“‘Experts in TB control had declared MDR treatment inordinately costly, but no one had tried to reduce the main expense, which was high-priced drugs.” It was discovered that the patents on most of those drugs had expired, but no one had sought to create inexpensive generic versions of them, because there was “no market.’”

“every dollar “invested in TB yields US $46 in benefits.” The report also found that between 2023 and 2050, there could be “almost one million averted deaths per year on average. . .‘“

“Although most of the money that went into developing bedaquiline came from the public . . . the drug was owned and patented by Johnson & Johnson, which had a monopoly and therefore absolute control over the price.”

“And so DOTS, even as it expanded treatment dramatically, had also continued the longstanding pattern of distrust and stigmatization of tuberculosis patients. It also offered only one solution . . . ‘DOTS will fail a lot of people.’”

“The reclining wood-slatted chair known as the Adirondack Chair was invented for TB patients, allowing them to rest outdoors without needing their beds wheeled outside.”

“People who are treated as less than fully human by the social order are more susceptible to tuberculosis. But it’s not because of their moral codes or choices or genetics; it’s because they are treated as less than fully human by the social order.”

“But then as now, tuberculosis does not travel primarily through paths forged by race, except insofar as human power structures force it to.”

“Black people were not more susceptible to TB because of factors inherent to race; they were more susceptible to tuberculosis because of racism.”

“being complimented for weight loss associated with life-threatening illness . . . The idea of becoming sick in order to look healthy or beautiful speaks to how profoundly consumptive beauty ideals still shape the world we share.”

“He would wish for death, but then wish for life, because “death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing.’”

“The way we symbolize disease ends up shaping the way we experience and respond to disease.”

“But as a friend once told me, “Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.’”

This book has been moving extremely slow up to this point and I have hopes it’s finally now going to pick up

“‘Everyone says that he fell because he flew too close to the sun . . . But he flew, do you see what I mean . . . He was able to fly. It doesn’t matter if you fall’” (pg. 173)

“- we are thirty in our hearts, before all the disappointment, all the ways it turned out to be so much more painful than we thought it would be, but then again, it has also been magic.” (Pg. 274)
- why am I sobbing.

“You’re right what you said about the trouble it is to make it through life, but here we are, so I guess we’ve outsmarted something.” (Pg. 256)

“… but we lease remember, that side I am also just a girl.” (Pg. 242). I know this is a term that girls often use to just joke around but in the context of this book this was gut wrenching.

“… there are complexities of human life that cannot be boiled down to black and white. Of course! Of course.” (Pg. 217)