Forget the Bird Flu Hype
There are More than 60,000 TB deaths a year in Pakistan alone and this description of the Resurgence of Tuberculosis is harrowing:

According to a statistics, nearly one-third of the world’s population is infected with tuberculosis, which kills almost 2 million people each year. Tuberculosis causes more deaths than any other infectious disease in the world. Though widely considered to be a curable disease thanks to the effective medicines, tuberculosis still remains the leading cause of death.

Compare that with this, from Selling 'pandemic flu' through a language of fear:

According to the World Health Organization, the first "outbreak" of the H5N1 virus, also known as avian flu, killed six people in 1997 in Hong Kong. Since then, H5N1 has allegedly killed 97 more worldwide, the majority of whom lived in poor, rural areas and had direct contact with dead or sick birds often kept in unsanitary conditions.

Qui bono? Pharmaceutical companies cannot extort money from public coffers as easily with an old scourge like TB. Governments also have a chance to gain in prestige, as noted by H.L. Mencken decades ago:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

[from Fearmongering quotes]