Author John Green on quest to eradicate TB

NEW YORK - You can roughly guess a person's age based on how they know John Green.

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The Fault In Our Stars writer has become an unlikely spokesperson in the global effort to fight the world's deadliest infectious disease

You can roughly guess a person's age based on how they know John Green.

Older millennials met Green and his brother, Hank, on YouTube in the late 2000s, when they were performing songs about Harry Potter and cultivating a fan base of "Nerdfighters."

Younger millennials probably know the American as the author of The Fault In Our Stars (2012), and other best-selling young-adult novels that feature complex and frequently tragic teenage characters.

Gen Zs herald Green as a beloved professor. Since 2012, he has hosted video lessons on history, literature and religion for an educational web series called Crash Course.

Members of Generation Alpha now comprise many of his 2.8 million followers on TikTok. Fans are drawn to the brothers' inside jokes and eclectic interests, such as a holiday centered on a photo of Green with a mustache. But even dedicated Nerdfighters were surprised by Green's intense focus on eradicating tuberculosis (TB), a disease that kills 1.6 million people annually.

TB is caused by a bacterium that is estimated to infect one-quarter of the world's population, but the disease receives little attention in wealthy nations.

Green, 47, has emerged as an unlikely spokesman in the global effort to fight the disease. His latest project, a book called Everything Is Tuberculosis, interweaves the social and scientific histories of tuberculosis with the present-day story of a young man from Sierra Leone named Henry Reider.

The book will be published in March by a division of Penguin Random House.

In a recent interview, Green described the book as his attempt to understand how TB could be both entirely curable and the deadliest infectious disease in the world.