Maybe Jill Biden forgot to put away the remote control and that's why hubby Joe, all twitchy and cable-TV-charged, practically suggested a shutdown of plane and subway travel.
Meanwhile, others used the flu news to flog their favorite cause or advance their prejudices. Bloggers and talk radio gozzleheads blame "dirty Mexicans" (or some variation) and scream for an immediate border shutdown. Never mind that not a single reputable public health official thinks that would do any good.
Fox anchor Shepard Smith hints that the flu story might be "just a distraction" (by that shifty Obama administration, we presume) from more serious issues. Another Fox host blithely repeats Internet tomfoolery that "the government knows a lot more than they are telling us."
Such overreaching seems particularly lame when one considers the straight news that needs to be reported and deftly analyzed.
On Wednesday, for example, World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan raised the infectious disease alert level to phase 5, one level short of a pandemic. Chan said "it really is all of humanity that is under threat in a pandemic."
Many news outlets reported that news a bit breathlessly, paying less attention to Chan's acknowledgment that advanced nations are much more prepared to cope with the illness than the developing world.
Also important to keep in mind: Chan and other health officials count on these alerts to spur preparedness -- planning for a possible vaccine, marshaling stocks of antiviral medications and the like.
The rest of us just need to keep our noses, and hands, clean and wait for further instructions. In the meantime, it wouldn't hurt to get a handle on what we're talking about here.
A "pandemic" sounds dangerous and it can be, though the formal declaration by the World Health Organization refers to a disease's reach, not its lethality.
A pandemic is an epidemic that effects many people over a wide swath of the planet. The WHO declares a pandemic when an infectious disease impacts two or more of the organization's international regions.
The current H1N1 virus eventually could kill many people, or relatively few -- a point that many news organizations (even those I'm gigging) got to, if you stuck with their coverage long enough.
Dr. William Shaffner of Vanderbilt University Medical Center brought some proportionality to Fox News, for example, by reminding viewers that seasonal influenza kills an average of 36,000 Americans a year, many more than the current swine flu has killed worldwide.
