Swine 'few'

I am thinking that the Swine Flu frenzy is more evidence of the media running amouk and creating something out of virtually nothing yet again. I swear I have no idea why I bother to pay attention to anything that is in the media anymore, based on my experience with the jackets, most of it is spun like a top or even flat out the opposite of reality.

The regular flu kills roughly 36 000 people a year every year, and now we have this Swine Flu that has killed 700 people world wide, and people are walking around with masks, schools are closing, and people have stopped going to work? Remember the S.A.R.S frenzy? It eventually killed 600 people in China yet the hysteria and paranoia over the virus was worldwide. Remember the meningitis scare from a few years before we started freaking out about SARS? Sure, these are dangerous, potentially deadly illnesses but the media latches their hooks into something and create a mania that need not exist.

Now they are saying that a Canadian farmer from my home province of Alberta had contracted the virus from a trip to mexico and gave it to his pigs! Oh brother...this poor guy in Alberta is going to be blamed for this phoney pandemic?

My favorite headline on the topic is this one:

Wild boars killed in Iraq over swine flu scare

Of course, they were in a zoo and they did it to calm some people's fears, but there is war and strife ongoing in Iraq and they put down some pigs because they are afraid of the flu? I would think that suicide bombers and the nutty war that is going on might be of greater concern.

Don't get me wrong, it is nice to know whatever is going on in the world, but take whatever is reported with a HUGE grain of salt. After all, it IS the other white meat.