Peebles’s Reviews > Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection > Status Update

"When people are scared, they are often told to take slow, deep breaths. But he couldn't take a deep breath."

Fair skin with rosy cheeks and prominent, round eyes all call to mind the final days before death from consumption. The cheeks are rosy from fever; the skin is white from deoxygenation; the cheeks and eyes are prominent because the body is, as one recent TB survivor put it, “becoming a skeleton.”

"...food was not considered to be an essential aspect of tuberculosis treatment, and so there was no funding for food. Some people became so hungry, she told me, that they left the hospital and stopped taking their medication, which increased the likelihood that the TB bacteria within them would continue multiplying, eventually developing resistance to first-line treatments."