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

Tuberculosis is so often and in so many ways a disease of vicious cycles. It’s an illness of poverty that worsens poverty. It’s an illness that worsens other illnesses, from HIV to diabetes. It’s an illness of weak healthcare systems that weakens healthcare systems. It’s an illness of malnutrition that worsens malnutrition. And it’s an illness of the stigmatized that worsens stigmatization.

Between 1985 and 2005, roughly as many people died of tuberculosis as in World Wars 1 and 2 combined.

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.

To me, tuberculosis was a disease of history— something that killed depressive 19th century poets, not present tense humans. But as a friend once told me, “nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”

There is nothing permanent or unalterable about health inequities.