John Green and Tuberculosis

This is Drug Story. I'm Thomas Getz. A few years ago, I wrote a book called The Remedy. It was about tuberculosis, which is the deadliest infectious disease in human history. The bacteria that causes TB was first identified in 1882 by a German physician and researcher named Robert Koch. Koch was an amazing scientist, but quite a flawed human being. This discovery was perhaps the biggest breakthrough in the history of medicine up to that time because tuberculosis was a horrible disease. In The US and other countries, TB was the leading cause of death at the time. More people died of TB than heart disease or cancer or any noninfectious disease. So to finally know what caused TB, a germ. Well, that seemed like the first step towards a cure. Koch's discovery got people hoping that it might be possible to actually vanquish this most deadly disease in human history. And sure enough, a few years after he discovered the bacteria that caused TB, Robert Koch announced that he had also discovered the cure, the remedy. Well, not to spoil the ending of my own book, but in actual fact, Koch's remedy did not work. It was debunked by none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, who was at the time also a doctor and a writer. He had just created a detective character called Sherlock Holmes. This is a crazy story. It's an amazing tale of science and innovation and ego. That's kind of why I wrote a whole book about it. And it's still worth reading, even now that you kind of know the ending. Well, it would actually take more than half a century before a true cure for tuberculosis came along, and that was streptomycin. It was an antibiotic that was discovered in 1943. Streptomycin works. It kills the bacteria that causes TB. And since then, several other antibiotics have been discovered that work even better. Because the thing about TB is it changes. The bacteria adapts to the drugs. It finds a way to evolve around the the antibiotic and keep going. Since Koch's discovery of the bacteria in 1882, more than a billion people have died of the disease. Even with antibiotics, even today, people die of TB. More than a million people a year, in fact. They're mostly in Asia, Africa, and India. These people die even though there are drugs that work, that cure the disease. Well, in today's episode of drug story, I'm actually going to let someone else tell that story. John Green, the author of another book about TB called Everything is Tuberculosis. You may have heard of it. It's been a bestseller for months, and he says some very nice things about my book in there, which I appreciate. So today, I'm handing over drug story to John Green and the excellent journalist Dan Weissman. He's host of the NPR podcast An Arm and a Leg. In this episode of An Arm and a Leg, Dan does …