Northern clouds have silver linings

摘要

North-west England has above-average rainfall, so with all those rain clouds there ought to be a silver lining or two. That was certainly the case a century ago, when the region's burgeoning shipping industry hit a problem it had no idea how to fix. Shipowners whose vessels were travelling to far-flung places, including the tropics, were finding that their crews were succumbing to tropical diseases never seen before in the UK, from sleeping sickness to river blindness.