While China’s domestic media reels over the threat of ebola, praising the government’s efforts in fighting a cold it hasn’t caught, tuberculosis (TB) remains by far the country’s deadliest disease, having claimed the lives of approximately 45,150 in 2012, according to the World Health Organization.

TB is the second leading cause of death among infectious diseases in the world. HIV/AIDS is the first. But unlike AIDS, tuberculosis has a cure. In fact, it’s had a cure since the early 1950s. It’s also easily transmittable, not just through feces and blood like ebola, but through coughing, sneezing and breathing.

So why does the media focus on ebola instead of a treatable disease that’s killing 120 Chinese citizens each day?

“The international media find it easier to focus on the acute and present than on the historical problems that TB presents – the former being perceived as a ‘sexier’ and more ‘newsworthy’ subject,” said Dr. Christopher K M Hui, who works in both the academic and clinical sides of respiratory medicine for Hong Kong University.

And while China’s news media isn’t always keen on following the international news media, when a story like ebola rolls around — one that combines the shock value to distract people from more pressing issues with the highly likely chance that authorities will end up looking competent — they’re more than happy to hop onboard.

Long-Term Problems Aren’t Sexy

In 1990, TB killed 360,000 people in China. So the country has made progress. In fact, they’ve made a lot of progress. But more can be done.

“The challenges in regards to TB now are with identification, diagnosis and monitoring patient compliance with therapy, which is required over a long period of time for successful treatment,” said Hui. Even unsubsidized, these measures only amount to a few yuan daily, he said.

The working class is most susceptible to TB, but it’s not like they can’t pay for treatment, Hui said. It’s that they aren’t educated about the necessity of completing treatment. To fight TB, you need to have doctors willing to tell their patients the importance of taking all the medicine – three to four pills a day for 6 to 12 months. But more than that, you need a media that tells people, “Ebola is scary, but keep TB in mind and here’s what to do when you get it.”

As it turns out, money is being thrown at the TB problem — the central government increased spending on TB control from 40 million to 580 million in 2010 — but it’s unclear whether it’s being spent optimally. According to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), in 2011 China’s rate of “public awareness on general knowledge” about TB was as low as 57 percent. In that year, only 47 percent sought treatment when infected and only 59 percent completed their treatment. The BMJ calls this lack of education a “major handicap” for TB prevention and control in China.

In an extreme example of what lack of education can lead to, a man in Gansu killed his wife and three children in 2011 because they were infected by tuberculosis, which he thought was incurable.

And in 2012, a young man who had just been accepted to the Ph.D. program at Hong Kong University, Wang Hao, was fatally stabbed by a 17-year old patient he had never treated. The patient was upset, in part, because he was told to return for treatment to cure his TB, which he had contracted after receiving treatment for an unrelated illness at the Harbin hospital where Wang was working. When his father was asked who he blamed for the death, he responded, “I blame the health care system.” His killer was uneducated, frustrated, and thought that doctors were tricking him by insisting he return over a course of months to treat his TB.

“Slow Motion Car Crash”

Tuberculosis isn’t like ebola, which kills roughly half the people it infects. There is no specific cure for ebola. That’s scary out of context. But unless you’re slumming it in Sierra Leone, Guinea or Liberia, there’s little reason to be obsessed about the disease. (The American media would do especially well to remember this, as the Norwegian Nobel Committee recently chided.)

“People are naturally — fatalistically? — drawn to emerging medical problems such as ebola that capture the imagination,” Hui said. “A car crash in slow motion is never quite as appealing as the ‘full speed’ Hollywood explosions that you see on-screen. TB is a little like a car crash in slow, slow motion.”

Kevin is a freelance journalist and an editor for Shenzhen Daily. He lives in Shenzhen. Follow him @kevinpinner.

- From our correspondent’s painful introduction to Beijing

I knelt at the top of the hospital escalator, partly from exhaustion, mostly out of surrender. My moans and cries recalled childhood Halloween nights spent puking up entire plastic jack-o-lanterns of candy. My tears blurred reality. Loud, distracted, exotic shapes and figures brushed past me, unimpressed by my misery, misery unlike any I’d felt before.

This wasn’t how I imagined my first week in China would go.

Five hours earlier I had woken up at 3 am to discover my right testicle swollen to softball size. I banged the wall and demanded ice, as if massaging ice cubes over my ball would cure everything. Tiffany, my hotel neighbor and co-worker, heard the howls and rushed over. I motioned toward my privates then shouted some variation of “Jesus fucking Christ, get some fucking ice NOW.” She returned five minutes later ice-less. My company’s welcome package failed to notify me that ice doesn’t exist in China.

Around a half-hour later I acknowledged my problem wasn’t going to shrink any time soon. We limped down countless hotel stairs, each step more painful than the last, until cool Beijing autumn air smacked us in the face. An ambulance blared its furious siren while early-birds set up their baozi stands. The EMTs lifted us aboard as I continued to mouth off about the hotel’s ice shortage. My left hand gripped Tiffany’s and my right hand held my tender ball as we whipped around congested hutongs. An eternity later some giggling nurses carted me into a Guomao-subway-station-crowded emergency room. Stretcher-bound patients decorated the otherwise colorless walls, family members wrestling for space to treat their sick.

Tiffany, a Chinese-Canadian, assumed translation duties. Her basic Chinese combined with my incessant whimpers somehow communicated the symptoms to the non-English-speaking hospital staff. The hospital required us to go through various checkpoints before seeing an actual doctor, each one followed by unbearable twenty-minute detours to the cashier’s counter.

With King Minos’s labyrinth complete, real assistance found us, albeit assistance without any privacy. Tiffany, along with a doctor and some complete strangers, watched me pull down my pants to reveal a monster, now triple its partner-in-crime’s size. I met Tiffany two months prior to this and had fantasized about dropping my pants in front of her under much different circumstances. However, as I laid sprawled out on a makeshift hospital bed with an old Chinese dude cupping my nut, I eliminated any outside chances of us ever hooking up.

I tried to interpret Tiffany and the doctor’s conversation but ran against an impossible language barrier. I waved my arms, screamed, clutched my head, and cursed — anything to make them recognize my agony. Tiffany, better known for her giggly, immature, and oftentimes bizarre personality, kept a straight face as she translated the doctor’s spot-check diagnosis while I yanked up my pants.

“He says you need to get the surgery now or you’re going to, like, you know, lose it. There’s a vein that, like, got twisted and your, you know, um, it’s dying. He says it will, like, die soon and that you’re lucky it hasn’t died already.”

Die? How do balls just die? I refused to believe it. This wasn’t serious, nothing a little ice couldn’t solve. These Chinese doctors just wanted to rob the clueless foreigner. I called my sole Beijing friend, Lisi, to get a second opinion. She listened to me choke through tears, then told me she was too busy to come right away but would make some calls.

An X-ray or three later confirmed the initial prognosis – to forgo surgery would doom my ball to a saggy, shrunken, deflated, prune-like existence. The surgery cost had a couple more zeroes than my bank account did, my live savings already depleted from the earlier check-ups. At a loss and with my back to the wall, I wandered through the hospital alone until pure fatigue brought me to my knees. Tiffany found me amongst the crowd at the top of the escalator, knelt down beside me, patted my shoulder, and lowered her head.

Then, at our lowest point, two angels descended to our hell on earth. Lisi’s reinforcements had arrived. They delivered us to the hospital’s spotless international building. Gefeng, the talkative angel, informed us that a friend of a friend’s uncle happened to be the hospital’s manager and could accelerate the process.

A while later, Lisi arrived and all but ordered Gefeng, her boyfriend at the time, to pay my surgery bill. I wonder if he would’ve paid had he known Lisi and I had met in Thailand the summer before and fallen in love. Of course, I still had a huge crush on her, and had come to China for her. The five of us moved into my cushy private room (equipped with flat-screen TVs, personal bathroom, and office) to discuss the surgery with the doctors. At this point the immeasurable pain I experienced earlier had faded a bit. The doctors claimed this could be attributed to my ball’s near demise. Time was ticking. Just before heading into surgery, the doctors informed me that my friend had a 50/50 chance of being saved. They then presented two options in the event my worst fear came true. Option one: keep it, although it would technically be dead. As time passed it would shrivel away, but at least I’d still have a pair. Option two: cut it and live out my remaining years as a uni-baller. My friends stared at me, waiting for a decision between shitty outcome number one and shitty outcome number two. My fingers formed scissors, the universal testicular amputation sign.

The nurses pushed me into the hallway, now moments away from knowing my ball’s fate. My eyes turned to my comrades, the necessary farewell speech ready to be released. Accustomed to the wallflower role in social situations, I despised being the center of attention. I cried, not from pain but from the unbelievable kindness these four people had shown me. Never one for words, I just smiled, stared up at the ceiling, and mumbled that I’d be OK and not to worry. Then the nurses rolled me away.

The surgery room’s malevolent lighting, icy cold temperature, and sprawling steel blankness duplicated a horror film torture chamber. Metal tools passed hands, fingers playing with my arm hair. Jokes lost in translation, lost in my desire to be anywhere else. Nurses chuckled through hygiene masks, the smell of rubber gloves and iodine now swimming through my nostrils. Cold hands organized my body into the pregnant-lady-in-labor position. As the anesthesiologist stabbed one epidural after another into my spine, I contemplated the tattoo inscribed inside my left bicep: “so it goes.” When I discovered Vonnegut in college I decided this three-word phrase encapsulated any life philosophy I may or may not have.

Life is wild. In less than 24 hours you can go from singing along with Frank Ocean’s “Thinking about you,” smiling ear-to-ear because the girl of your dreams agreed to accompany you to the Great Wall, all the way to being strapped to a hospital bed as strange Chinese guys saw your testicle in half.

So it goes.

I woke up hazy. A school of eyeballs stared down at me.

“Well?” I asked.

One surgeon flashed a smile. “I think you very happy.”

Chinglish never sounded better.

Bryce is a lifelong Washington Wizards fan living in Beijing.