Regular influenza kills a lot of people, but most people have a residual immunity from similar previous strains that prevents the spread. Nobody has a resistance to swine flu, meaning that if proper precautions are not made, very quickly orders of magnitude more people could catch it than ever catch regular flu, which means orders of magnitude more deaths and no way to contain it. And more people catching it means it is more likely for one person to catch it and another strain of flu at the same time (ie bird flu) which means we could then have a particularly lethal strain spreading just as fast on our hands.
Ignore the media's "scaremongering". The WHO is at a level 5 alert for a reason, and it is people who actually know something about infectious diseases, not over-excitable journalists, who you should be listening to.
As I've said before, the simplest of precautions (ie washing hands regularly) can have massive effect on inhibiting the spread of a respiratory virus. Ignoring this advice due to cynicism or apathy costs lives.
Christ.
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