This seems to be much more likely than an avian flu pandemic and affects a lot more people every year. With TB being so contagious/airborne, I would guess the preparations and plans to deal with such an event would be similar to an avian flu outbreak?

CNN article...

Uh, could this be Eugenics by proxy? 80 years is not a long time to develop and deploy a such a diabolical yet effective political strategy.

Careful Benjamin, the simple mention of politics is likely to get you scolded these days.

You're right on the money (about the money). It's not only density that will determine which "cured" diseases will rise up again to cause problems. Typically, diseases that strike developed countries get most of the research funding. Flu is huge because it threatens the developed world, and the funding is pouring out from a whole alphabet of government agencies.

TB and malaria are both making drug-resistant comebacks around the world but the research is lagging due to funding, especially at the point where you need clinical trials. The NIH has made both of these priorities (as has the Gates Foundation), but they only pay for the initial lab work. Drug companies typically pay for the more expensive R&D phase, which includes the trials, but without a clear model of how they will make a profit they won't invest the funds. There is no profit in curing poor people in India and Africa.

Until kids in Florida start getting multi-drug-resistant malaria there won't be any rush, but by then we'll be 10 years behind the curve.

Okay then, Eugenics by default. Skip the political slant, lets just say its an economically Darwinian concept.

There was an 'outbreak' of TB on the local reservation a few years ago, and I asked my doctor about it. She said that it isn't easily acquired, that it usually takes repeated exposure.

My memory being what it is (or isn't), I looked it up and I apparently recalled it correctly.

"...transmission of TB usually occurs only after prolonged exposure to someone with active TB. On average, people have a 50 percent chance of becoming infected with TB if they spend eight hours a day for six months or 24 hours a day for two months working or living with someone with active TB, researchers have estimated."

More info at the source: NIAID Excerpt

From the Center for Disease Control:
"To become infected, a person usually has to spend a relatively long time in a closed environment where the air was contaminated by a person with untreated tuberculosis who was coughing and who had numerous M. tuberculosis organisms (or tubercle bacilli) in secretions from the lungs or larynx. Infection is generally transmitted through the air; therefore, there is virtually no danger of its being spread by dishes, linens, and other items that are touched, or by most food products."

More info at the source: CDC on TB

Sue