Everything Is Tuberculosis
How can I accept a world where over a million people will die this year for want of a cure that has existed for nearly a century?
written on: 2025-12-22
My grandmother had tuberculosis. She survived thanks to the drugs developed while she had the disease. She was sent to a Massachusetts hospital that housed thousands of TB patients. The stigma surrounding TB was powerful then—it “othered” those who had it. My grandmother never told me about her TB, only that she’d been sick as a child. I didn’t learn the truth until recently. Perhaps the lingering stigma kept her from sharing this with her grandson, even after all those years.
Reading about TB’s history made me think of her—of what her life must have been like at that time, how painful that experience must have been.
It infuriates me that people still die from this disease around the world, largely due to the pharmaceutical industry’s relentless profit motives. It frightens me to think our failure to eradicate TB could spawn a future strain completely resistant to our current antibiotics. However, I remain hopeful that this is something humanity can accomplish.