When Frances Wilson set out to chronicle the great ‘disease of storytellers’ on the streets of London, she had no idea of the twist in her own story that awaited
... the most strikingly invisible part of London is the air we breathe. Since the Clean Air Act 1956 we no longer have the peasoupers like the one described by Charles Dickens in Bleak House where there is fog everywhere, “making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot as big as full-grown snowflakes”. But just because the air is now clear doesn’t mean it is clean. London air is thick with bacteria, one strain of which – the tubercle bacillus – is a major cause of tuberculosis (TB). The development, in the 1940s and 50s, of the drugs streptomycin and isoniazid led many people – myself included – to assume that TB had been eradicated. But like so much else in London, it had simply gone underground. Of more than 5,000 TB patients diagnosed in England every year, nearly 40% are Londoners. London is the TB capital of Europe.
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