I agree with you about the Swine Flu comment. To keep things in proportion I go to the CDC Flu website: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/fluactivity.htm which gives weekly and seasonal flu activity reports. If you look at flu activity for April 12-18, 2009, you’ll see the sad number of pediatric deaths for just this season: 55; that’s before a child died of swine flu this week. The other 55 died of other strains of seasonal flu. So flu’s always there—-about 37,000 American die of the flu yearly–we should always take common sense precautions and get vaccinated, but we somehow forget that there’s always background risk, and only pay attention to new and newsworthy topics.

I agree with you about the Swine Flu comment. To keep things in proportion I go to the CDC Flu website: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/fluactivity.htm which gives weekly and seasonal flu activity reports. If you look at flu activity for April 12-18, 2009, you’ll see the sad number of pediatric deaths for just this season: 55; that’s before a child died of swine flu this week. The other 55 died of other strains of seasonal flu. So flu’s always there—-about 37,000 American die of the flu yearly–we should always take common sense precautions and get vaccinated, but we somehow forget that there’s always background risk, and only pay attention to new and newsworthy topics.