In the early 1600s, tuberculosis infections began to spread rapidly in England and over the next centuries throughout Western Europe. Ever-growing cities provided fertile ground for person-to-person, airborne spread. Almost every Western European was eventually infected. Incredibly, for more than a century, about one-in-four deaths were due to tuberculosis — a sustained death toll that was much higher than even the worst one-year death rates from Covid. We see the impact in Figure 4.1, where tuberculosis in London topped out around 1750, killing almost 1% of the population each year — a curve
...more
