No, it’s not.  That’s the media talking.

I hate to break it to the doomsday-fearing, apocalyptic types (actually, wait, I LOVE spoiling their fun with a nice dose of reality) but this whole Swine Flu Pandemic thing is ridiculous.  The more I hear about it the more I just want to throttle the media for their epic bid for coverage.  Will they stop at nothing?  Is it a conspiracy by Tami-flu and face mask manufacturers to hype this outbreak up and blow it WAY out of proportion?

I’m not claiming to be an expert on the subject or a doctor.  And if all the sudden the world becomes infected and we all turn into zombies then I’ll be happy to say, “my bad.”  But until that happens, lemme put this in perspective:

There have been 257 confirmed cases of Swine Flu worldwide according to CNN as of 4/30/09.  Most of those were in Mexico and there have been 109 confirmed cases and 1 death in the United States as of the same date.  There are about 310,000,000 people in the U.S.  As a percentage, about 0.0000351612903% of the United States population is currently receiving treatment for Swine Flu.

As Jack Cafferty noted in his blog today, “More than 13,000 people in the U.S. have died of complications from seasonal flu since January; and it’s expected to continue killing hundreds of people a week. In total, about 36,000 people a year die from the flu in this country; and worldwide, the annual death toll is somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000.”

Also dying in the United States this year are:

936,923 due to cardiovascular disease (McDonald’s is a much more threatening pandemic)

553,091 due to cancer (Why aren’t we wearing masks whenever people smoke around us?  The sun is even a pandemic!)

43,354 due to motor vehicle accidents (Is the auto industry going bankrupt because it’s causing a pandemic?!)

13,322 due to falls (Watch out!  Those stairs are a pandemic!)

3,842 due to drowning (Don’t go swimming…it’s a pandemic!)

etc. etc. etc.

For reference, and to compare side-by-side to the “Swine Flu Pandemic”, since February 2003 about 675,000 men, women and children have been raped and murdered in the Sudan.  Break it down further and that’s  300 people a day.  300 people are murdered every single day in the Sudan with no end in sight. If anything is a “pandemic” it’s the war and genocide that kills thousands every day across the world that the media and world governments turn a blind eye to.  It’s the deaths and murders that occur right here in the U.S. because of poverty, or lack of education, or lack of psychiatric/medical care, or race, or sexual orientation, or…

So if I hear anything more about this “pandemic” of a flu virus I’m going to go insane.