@Bill Desmond

Add to that the intensive drive by various lunatic fringes and religious fanatics to convince parents to stop with vaccinations and innoculations (to date still the most reliable form of preventing disease and epidemics) and the picture just got a whole lot scarier.

At one point Tuberculosis was the number one cause of death for the ages 10-20 (up to a quarter of the deaths before 18 years of age).
An ‘innocent’ disease like measles is actually a vicious killer and the only reason it is not regularly decimating the population is because over thousands of years, especially in western europe and northern america where the disease is endemic, we have developed a natural resistance. A resistance that is rapidly fading due to the fact that thanks to anti-virals and vaccination hardly anybody gets a serious infection anymore. Take the vaccination out of the picture and things could get ugly in a hurry.

A new generation of anti-virals is desperately needed, but it is questionable that even if they are created (and the list of vectors by which a virus or bacteria can be attacked is rapidly diminishing) they will be shared with the rest of the world. To be useful treatment with these hypothetical new medicines need to be controlled in enclosed wards so as to ensure the disease does not infect the hospital staff and that the treatment is completed and the patient is virus free before being dismissed. Countries that can not garantuee this may find themselves without the benefit of new medicines…

And Tuberculosis is not going to be the new pandemic. It kills too slow for that (though it is very quick to infect). The best (worst) bet is still on bird flue, as that is 2 mutations away from becoming airborne transmittable and human-human infectious. And has a kill rate of 50pct (most tuberculosis infections are non-lethal or treatable with low level methods like clean air and UV radiation).

But the medium term picture is rather bleak unless we get serious about health care globally and start realising that a new deadly disease emerging in the jungle of vietnam can reach the USA within a day and be equally untreatable there. For most of our history plagues have been a fact of life and killing off half or more the population before they even could start thinking of having children themselves. This past century we have become complacent and started to belief that those times were behind us forever.

The information on various sites, such as the Centre For Disease Prevention and ohters, and in the Indian media, are reporting this has been observed for some time,  and there are reports of over 2000 fatalities at present.  It appeared in Chechnya as well.
What the research also points out is that no new front line TB antibiotics have been developed for decades, as they are not profitable. 
I’ve lived in India from time to time, and know that antibiotics are very common, inappropriately used (eg. for viral infections) never given for long, and the medications are often out of date or adulterated, or just fake.  Marvellous country, wonderful hardworking long suffering people, but terrible poverty, crowding, spitting, enemic infectious diseases, parasites, debilitated people, chronic malnutrition, heat, humidity, poor quality water, little sanitation or sewedge treatment—-all in all, a receipe for a plague like disease to appear.
This could be it, and its all an 8 hour flight from Europe, and 12 hours from North America.

We may be sleep walking to a nightmare.