“By the middle of the 18th century, around 1% of London’s population was dying from tuberculosis (TB) every year. You can see this in the chart below, which shows modeled estimates of TB death rates in London. Every year, 1 in 100 people died from TB. That means that if you lived in London, every five years, 1 in 20 people you knew might have died from it. If London were to experience that scale of infection and death today, tuberculosis would kill around 90,000 people every year.