Swine Flu, 'Bird Flu' before that, 'SARS' before that.
To be honest, it's a case of Cry Wolf. Sure, we can all laugh at it now, but the potential risks are all there - were all there. It isn't scaremongering when your government pays huge sums to ensure the vast majority of the population can be vaccinated or when health care centres are preparing for the worst case scenario. It's reality.
Sure, with tabloid newspapers, it goes OTT. But one of these days, a strain may develop that is worth worrying about and by then, we'll probably still laugh it off. Antibiotics are still being over used, the drug companies realise it isn't the safest viable choice to invest in developing original drugs and people beg for antibiotics when all they need is lemon juice in steaming water.
MRSA, multi-drug resistant TB, C. diff and Acinetobacter strains... they're all out there and they all pose huge risks in the future, especially if you end up stuck in hospital. Some strains exist and they are already resistant to all known drugs at safe doses and here, I'm not talking about those random bacteria that actually pose no pathological threat. I'm talking about the things that give you the Death.
I think it's all rather selfish of us to be blaming people of scaremongering, when really, those people deserve our thanks for making us aware of it, setting up measures to limit the damage and actually making sure it didn't cause its full potential damage. I imagine most people here are young, healthy people so you probably would have just felt awful, but there are millions - parents, grandparents, children, siblings etc - who could have easily been killed by an unfamiliar strain of influenza.
