Are You Sick Yet?

Run for the hills, the Pandemic of SARS-Avian-West Nile-Swine Flu is coming and NOTHING can stop it! Didn't you hear, almost four thousand people have died from it. Of course nine times as many people have died from normal seasonal flu, but this is a PANDEMIC people. I know, I heard it on TV. I'm not exactly sure how bad a pandemic is, but it sounds an awful lot like epidemic, and I KNOW that is not good.

I think it is time we all turned off our TVs, throw away that rag called a newspaper, turn the dial from Rush to white noise, and get some distance from the insanity that has taken over the media, and apparently, the government and medical community. Every year it is a new disease that is coming to wipe us out. I suppose this is merely an extension of the "Fear Everything" society that developed post-911, but I am bored of it.

I am sorry but Swine flu lacks the sex appeal that something like an Ebola or Flesh-Eating disease. If the contaminated do not bleed out of their eyes or become rabid psychopaths, how am I supposed to get all worked up about it? What is the death rate on this thing? 1 in 100 000 or something so abstract I find it hard to take seriously. I am sure that those affected by this do not agree with me, but that does not change anything. Somewhere along the line people lost any rational link to risk management. Long odds are played as the apocolypse while very real and dire problems are downplayed.

This would make an interesting book were it not true.