This Swine Flu crap is making me laugh. Seriously. I’ve gotten, in the past 3 days, multiple emails from governement agencies (because we get internal emails here at work) telling people to really be careful about this. This is totally and completely blown out of proportion.

I’m typing this as my co-working, sitting 15 feet away, is on the phone CANCELING her trip to Mexico in JULY. It’s the top story on every major news outlet, the top result trending on every search engine and the most talked about subject around the water cooler.

Let me put this into perspective for you. As of this morning, according to CNN, 230 have confirmed cases of piggy flu, including 91 in the US. By comparison, between 50,000 and 70,000 people DIE every year from the NORMAL FLU. Don’t believe me, check the numbers. How about a statistic with closer numbers. Every DAY, 5,000 people are rear-ended in a car accident. Or how about 341 people, per day, are killed in a head on collision. There ya go. You have a better chance of being in a deadly head on collision today, than contracting the pig pox.

Of course, the news isn’t going to tell you that. They want you to panic. They want my co-worker to cancel her trip. They want to fill up ERs, drug stores and doctors offices. You know why? Because it makes for awesome news. Their ratings go through the roof. People who don’t normally watch the news or watch news exclusively are suddenly glued to the channel. They make a mint in advertising dollars. Why do you think that “coming up next” or “when we return” they’ll tell you something new? It’s all a tease, a game, a bunch of steaming BS.

I should probably mention, that of those 91 people in the US, 1 kid has died. One baby. That baby came up from Mexico the day before. So, there ya go. The poor kid who died is just another number in the expected 70,000 to be killed by flu this year. It sounds bad, 70,000 sounds like a bad number, but you just have to put it into perspective.

Drive safe.