Scare-Mongering: Avian Flu

So I have gotten somewhat sick of the news coverage about the Avian Flu and how it is going to kill us all. I decided that if I was supposed to be scared about something that sounded more like the 'Doom of Big Bird' that it would be nice to at least have some facts about it. So I swung by the CDC website and dug out this set of pages about the Avian Flu.

To put it simply, I am more irritated with the press then scared. To put this in perspective...

In one of the most densely populated regions on the Earth, there have been what appears to be less then one hundred people dead from Avian Flu since 1997 when it was first detected as possibly being transmitable from poultry to people.

In the United States, in 2002 alone, 'normal' influenza and pneumonia killed fifty-six thousand people.

If the press really wants to go all gung-ho on a 'pandemic' why don't they go back to talking about the one that really exists, AIDS. According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV approximately 40.3 million people worldwide are currently infected with it, almost five million new infections in 2005, and three million deaths due to it this year alone.

Call me a cynic, but I suspect that since about two and a half million of those deaths were in Africa, and since our current foreign policy makes it more likely we are going to send bombs there then humanitarian aid, we aren't going to hear anything in the news about it until someone famous organizes some big charity gala and suddenly it involves celebrities and designer clothing.