Now by that title you would think that I intend to make light of the recent uproar over the Swine Flu or H1N1 as it’s being called now. My major point is that I think the media loves to overhype things and take things to such a great level that people get worried over nothing. Would a massive epidemic of Swine Flu be horrible? Yes. Is it likely to happen? No. You see there hasn’t even been 60 cases in the United States yet and there is all this commotion over it. Only 1 confirmed death has been related to these cases and it was a 24 month old child. A 24 month old obviously has a higher mortality rate when it comes to almost any sickness or disease.

The H1N1 strain of the flu that is out there is sort of a bastard child of the Spanish Flu strain that caused a massive coast to coast epidemic in 1918. There was also an epidemic of Swine Flu in 1976. All 3 strains, from the 1918 to 1976 to 2009 are all related. The ’76 epidemic is an absolutely scary sign of what may be coming in the near future. They released a vaccine for it and immunized enough of the population so that the immunity would spread and kill the epidemic. After the dust settled and scientific research was conducted on the whole affair, a startling conclusion came about. More people were killed by the vaccine than were killed by the disease itself. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that now.

I’m sure all or most of you also remember the Avian Flu or H5N1 mass panic of a while back. This is slightly different as there has been more cases faster with Swine Flu but not by much. Where did Avian Flu go? It wasn’t the Flu shot. It wasn’t anything besides taking average everyday steps to not get sick. The media blew it up into a hypestorm the likes of which I haven’t seen in years over anything that isn’t politics. And what was all that for? It accomplished nothing and H5N1 went the way of the Dodo pun intended.

I wish that people would just think about it seriously before they listen to everything that the media says word for word. At least for now. Medical technologies have improved more than ten fold since the previous two outbreaks of the strain. I think that the government being as on top of it as they are, and by government I mean local and state governments where minor outbreaks are occuring, makes it increasingly less likely that this will ever get that far. You are far more likely at this point to get struck by lightning TWICE in your lifetime than you are to get this new Flu variant.