All this fuss about H1N1a(swine flu) seems to have been blown a little out of proportion to me. The mortality rate of this virus seems to be pretty low. The real danger is if it manages to mutate into another more lethal form and the way they are jumping on this one at the moment makes that somewhat unlikely for awhile.
The 1918-20 influenza epidemic had about a 5% mortality rate and killed a conservative figure of about 22million people(more than the first world war) and the one that does alarm me is H5N1(birdflu) which seems to have about a 40% mortality rate, now that is scary.
These things go in cycles of a pandemic approx ever 30 years(the honk kong flu in the seventies killed about 2 million people worldwide). The problem these days is the media attention that almost seems to want to whip up hysteria about this sort of thing.