Great post! I especially appreciate the point made about:

"People obsessing about spending 5 minutes in elevators with others (an infinitesimal chance of contagion) will blithely cross the street against the light to have a artery-clogging triple cheeseburger with fries and then smoke a pack of cigarettes. These things have much higher risks, but because we have grown accustomed to them, we don’t think of the risks. They are not, in the technical term, salient; but they are much more dangerous."

It always fascinates me how our minds trick us into worrying about something (and if you take the media out of it, it's quite arbitrary, given the many topics we could conceivably fret over) when we have the capacity and ability to think much better feeling (and more productive) thoughts at any given moment. It's a choice, but so many of us are still unaware of this, but I think this is changing, too, thank goodness!

We are all lemmings. News itself is a marketing tool. I own a lab testing company and business soared for flu shots and flu screens. At least I was on the right side of the issue for this one..

Nobody knows the real risks of H1N1 - at least not yet. The 1918 outbreak started out benign and then killed more people than WWI. I haven't exactly seen people panicking about this so I don't know where the idea has come that there is an over-reaction. It could yet get really serious, and the 1918 disease killed a huge number of young people. Going back to the middle ages, the black death killed perhaps 40% of Europeans. However, it's only really been since WWII that human beings have managed to control infectious diseases and the tools available to us might yet fail by degrees. Microbes have been around a great deal longer than us - only those born since the middle of the 20th century can afford to be quite so complacent (of course what we have managed to do is increase human numbers to plague levels - if you want a risk for the future with unimaginable consequences, then that's the one).

If you want to look at real cases where things are taken out of all proportion then look at some of the press stories about very rare or one-off risks. There are panics over quite tiny increases in risk, like mercury in tuna or vaccine reactions. These present no realistic risk of mass deaths - just a very, tiny risk to any one individual.

The H1N1 'flu is a different type. At the moment it presents little risk to most people, but that's not necessarily going to remain the case. It's one of those things where there is a small, but realistic chance that it could turn into something which is a far more serious risk than being killed in a car accident in the next decade. It merits coverage. If you want the objective measure of risk you crave, then you need to factor in the chance that it will turn into a mass killer. If you know that and can dismiss it - well that's rather better than most of the experts.