ALTMost people not knowing that tuberculosis is the world’s deadliest infectious disease is part of the reason tuberculosis remains the world’s deadliest infectious disease.
(Edited to add alt text)
countingwhales asked:
dear Mr Intern,
can you try to relate TB to the awesome coffee club as I am wondering if there is a relevance. I hope this will ne a fun challenge for you
The Awesome Coffee Club exists to provide people with the world’s best coffee and support efforts to radically reduce maternal and infant mortality in Sierra Leone.
Over 1,500,000 people will die of tuberculosis this year. Many of those people will be pregnant. TB has long been a major cause of non-obstetric maternal death; untreated tuberculosis has a mortality rate of around 40% among pregnant people. And so expanding access to TB treatment (and spreading information about the global tuberculosis pandemic) is central to the work of radically reducing maternal mortality in Sierra Leone and beyond.
A non-paywalled link to an essay I wrote about a young man I met in Sierra Leone in 2019, what happened to him, and why.
(In the picture above, Henry is at the far right, along with other survivors of MDR-TB and me, author and unpaid coffee company intern.)
Greetings from Sierra Leone. In 2019, I visited a tuberculosis hospital here and met a kid named Henry. He was very sick but also full of joy. He’d already been at the hospital for months, and his TB was not responding to treatment. He was 16, but looked no older than my nine-year-old son Henry.
Lakka Government Hospital is the best place in SL to receive treatment for drug resistant TB, but it is still dramatically underfunded. Especially back then, the newest and best treatments were simply unavailable, and many patients died as a result.
Over the next three years, Henry got so sick. Standard second-line treatment failed. He was a patient at the hospital for over THREE YEARS. He was such a special kid–one of his doctors referred to him “as the one who helps others”–and the staff was heartbroken as they watched him get sicker.
But then, through support from Partners in Health and Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Health, Henry became the first person in Sierra Leone to be treated with the newest and best combination of drugs for his TB.
He survived. He is cured.
I saw him today. I wept. He is in his first semester of university now. When I asked him how he was doing, he said, “So great.”
People ask me why I am so fixated upon TB and furious about it.
It’s because of Henry.
jonberry555 asked:
What's better, TB awareness or ethically sourced coffee?
I am a very, very big fan of our coffee, but…
If everyone in wealthy countries understood that TB has killed FORTY MILLION PEOPLE since the year 2000, and if everyone in wealthy countries was angry and disgusted by the ongoing horror of underfunded research and treatment distribution, then TB death rates would decline by 60 or 70% over the next decade, simply because more resources would be devoted to finding new treatments and effectively distributing current ones. (We’ve seen this happen before! Look at HIV/AIDS death between 2005 and 2015! They fell by over 50%, not primarily because of new treatments but because of a dramatic expansion of existing treatments. Same thing could happen with TB.)
Like, we might lose 20 million people in the 2030s to TB, not because it’s an impossible problem to solve but because we do not treat the problems of impoverished communities the way we treat the problems of rich communities.
So yeah, TB awareness (and activism! and fundraising! and advocacy for patients!) is vastly, vastly more important than the world’s best coffee.
What I learned this year during the project for awesome
Tired: Writing novels.
Wired: Learning about how in the late 19th century, people came to believe that women were dragging tuberculosis germs from the streets into their homes via their floor-length dresses, so hemlines were raised a few inches as a public health measure, which had the unintended consequence of increasing the significance of shoes in women’s fashion.
deeply enjoying this current era of john "not to make it about tuberculosis but" green
Not to make it about tuberculosis but: Did you know that tuberculosis kills more children every year than HIV or cancer?
Because it is the oldest human disease, and the illness that had spread around the globe the most efficiently even before the Columbian Exchange began, TB is at the center of so many historical narratives.
But it should also be at the center of CONTEMPORARY narratives, because we allow TB to kill over 1.5 million people every year.
In 2021, tuberculosis caused more death than war, homicide, malaria, meningitis, and cholera … combined.
TB is almost always curable.
And yet we choose to live in a world where 1.6 million people die of it every year.
