Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green
You can look at many world events through the lense of Tuberculosis. World War I may have been started due to TB. (The assassins of "ugly hat" guy were dying of TB and had nothing to lose.) Creativity was seen as something influenced by TB.
Today tuberculosis is curable. However, most of the victims are in the poorer, less developed world, while the cures are readily available in the developed world. The book focuses on the plight of a boy with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. He went through various failed treatments, before finally getting the special treatment needed to save his life. (The drugs were initially cost prohibitive and restricted.) It does seem like a simple solution would be to make the drugs and diagnosis tools cheaper and more readily available. However, there are challenges. There are already many strains of TB that are resistant to the most common treatments. What if they do become resistant to other drugs? TB treatment requires taking the drugs for a significant length of time. Would doling out more the drugs lead to more resistance? There is also the problem of finding new cures. Pharmaceutical companies have been doing little research into TB drugs because it is primarily a low-income problem with little potential revenue stream. The common TB tools and drugs are criticized for being too expensive. This brings a double-edge problem. Why spend the effort without the return. Since government's fund the research, shouldn't these drugs be nearly free? Alas, even with government research funding, there is still significant effort to produce and ship the drugs. What would be the best way to wipe out the disease?
The author is a novelist who came into tuberculosis through some personal encounters. The book is a personal rather than scientific view of the disease, though it does provide some basic scientific background.
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