John Green connects deadly disease to Stetson hats, svelte figures and weighted vests

Indianapolis Star

08-05-2025

Who knew tuberculosis had a connection to the development of the cowboy hat or the U.S. military or women's dress sizes?
John Green; that's who.
And the author was on 'The Daily Show' on May 7 spreading the knowledge in his campaign to end the world's most deadly infectious disease.
The curable disease, caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis, resulted in 1.25 million deaths in 2023, according to the Word Health Organization.
'I'm super opposed to tuberculosis,' he told host Desi Lydic. 'I'm a little confused why everyone else isn't. It feels like it should be kind of a universally-held opinion.'
The young adult genre ('The Fault in Our Stars,' 'Turtles All the Way Down') and social media (Vlogbrothers YouTube channel) star was promoting his New York Times bestseller 'Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection,' published in March.
Green shared how tuberculosis tied into the development of the modern-day American cowboy hat. The maker of the Stetson had moved from New Jersey to the West to recover from tuberculosis, he said.
The host challenged him to connect the disease to other trends and events.
Was there a connection to Navy fighter jets falling into the water, she asked, referencing the second time in just over a week that a U.S. Navy fighter jet from the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier was lost in the Red Sea.
President Harry S. Truman had requested the federal government budget $200,000 to fund the development of Isoniazid, one of the most critical tuberculosis drugs, Green responded.
'If it weren't for Harry Truman sending federal money, federal government taxpayer money, to fund the treatment of tuberculosis, we wouldn't have that amazing drug,' he said.
How about the popularity of weighted vests?
'Not even a challenge,' he answered. 'It's trying to shrink your body. It's trying to make you smaller. And that is a result, partly of this tubercular beauty standard. When we romanticized tuberculosis, in the 18th and 19th centuries, we began to associate beauty with very frail, small bodies. So attempts to shrink the female body are at least in part a response to this tuberculosis beauty standard that goes back to the 19th century.'
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Green, an Indianapolis resident, talked about a 2019 trip to Sierra Leone, where he got to know a youth who was trying to recover from drug-resistant tuberculosis and learned how widespread the disease was.
Over the next five years, he 'fell in hate' with the disease, and the book came about from wanting to tell 'his ultimate story of survival, and also wanting to tell the story of the fact that this disease is not history; it's present,' the writer told Lydic.
'It's the deadliest infectious disease in the world, and unfortunately, as a direct result of decisions made by our government, that number is going to go up instead of going down,' Green said. 'It's been going down for the last 20 years, which is something we can be really proud of.
"The U.S. has long been the most generous funder of TB response, but that's changing with the dismantling of USAID; and as a direct result, I think the estimates are that within two years, we might see two million people dying instead of over a million.'
That doesn't have to be, he said.
'We can achieve cure rates of over 95%. We do that in the United States, and we should be doing it globally. And the fact that we aren't really is kind of a mark of shame on humanity.'
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'We know how to live in a world without TB. You search for cases, you treat every case you find, and you offer preventative therapy to folks who are near those cases. And that's how we eliminated TB in the U.S.; or nearly eliminated it. That's how we've nearly eliminated TB in many countries around the world. But that takes funding. And right now, if you think of the history of tuberculosis as a long staircase where we learn more and learn better tools and have better tools to fight the disease, right now we have the tools; we just don't have the political will. So right now, unfortunately, we've fallen down the staircase.'
Green sounded hopeful, though.
'But it's easy to feel like this is the end of history. I feel that way all the time, to be honest with you. But it's not the end of history. This is the middle of the story, not the end of the story, and it falls to us to write a better end. And I really believe we can do that together. I really believe that I will live to see a world without tuberculosis.'