John Green, author of bestselling books including The Fault In Our Stars, is a passionate campaigner for eradicating tuberculosis. In his new book, Everything is Tuberculosis, he writes about the history of the disease, the role of the U.S., and why he decided to do something about it. An edited excerpt from an interview:

About 1.25 million people died from TB in 2023. It’s overwhelming, and we don’t know how to process these kinds of numbers. I wanted to write about one person and his personal experience with tuberculosis as a way of humanising the disease. I met Henry at a tuberculosis hospital in Sierra Leone in 2019 and he looked pretty healthy, but his TB wasn’t responding well enough to antibiotics. I was in Sierra Leone to learn about maternal health, but when I came home from that trip, I learned that TB is still our deadliest infectious disease.