I don’t know about you, but I’m really not worried about the swine flu. I believe that my years of eating pork products have paid off and that I’ve built a natural immunity.  :-) 

All kidding aside, I think we need to take a step back from the edge of hysteria. I wake up this morning to see OMG FIRST US DEATH DUE TO SWINE FLU. Except that it was a baby from Mexico who was brought into the US through Brownsville. Gotta love the media.

To put a little perspective on things:

… even during the worst ravages of the 1918 flu, 97.5 per cent of those infected survived and recovered. Or that 72 per cent of the population — even in the absence of the sophisticated public health planning and infrastructure that Canada and the U.S. have since built — was not infected during the pandemic. So, even if we had a repeat of the 1918 flu, the chances were seven out of 10 that you wouldn’t catch it and if you did, the odds were better than nine out of 10 that you’d survive.

And let us not forget that something like 30,000 to 50,000 people die of the plain old flu — in the United States — every year. But that’s boring news.

So, put away your face masks (which are useless against virusus) and look at the numbers for a minute. You are more likely to die on the ride to work than die from this flu, even if it became a full scale epidemic.

For now, I’m going to keep eating my bacon.