Kelsey Widner’s Reviews > Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection > Status Update
Kelsey Widner
is 85% done
“‘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.’”
— Aug 13, 2026 11:34AM
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Kelsey’s Previous Updates
Kelsey Widner
is 71% done
“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. . .‘“
— Aug 13, 2026 10:32AM
Kelsey Widner
is 66% done
“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.”
— Aug 13, 2026 10:16AM
Kelsey Widner
is 63% done
“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.’”
— Aug 13, 2026 10:08AM
Kelsey Widner
is 51% done
“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.”
— Aug 13, 2026 09:21AM
Kelsey Widner
is 43% done
“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.”
— Aug 13, 2026 08:57AM
Kelsey Widner
is 41% done
“But then as now, tuberculosis does not travel primarily through paths forged by race, except insofar as human power structures force it to.”
— Aug 13, 2026 08:53AM
Kelsey Widner
is 41% done
“Black people were not more susceptible to TB because of factors inherent to race; they were more susceptible to tuberculosis because of racism.”
— Aug 13, 2026 08:52AM
Kelsey Widner
is 35% done
“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.”
— Aug 13, 2026 08:38AM
Kelsey Widner
is 31% done
“He would wish for death, but then wish for life, because “death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing.’”
— Aug 12, 2026 05:11PM
Kelsey Widner
is 27% done
“The way we symbolize disease ends up shaping the way we experience and respond to disease.”
— Aug 12, 2026 02:21PM