Swine Flu Will Not Kill Us After All

Mystery illness fails to deliver on havoc-wreaking potential

By SARA K. SMITH

Updated 12:21 PM EDT, Sun, Jul 12, 2009

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The dreaded Pig Death Virus has only killed one person north of the border.

We had an exciting national panic on our hands for all of a week, and goodness, those were fun times!

Who doesn't love a little paranoiac biological warfare Armageddon reporting to keep them young? Last week, we saw our beloved would-be Surgeon General Sanjay Gupta all over the television, 24 hours a day, and when Dr. Gupta wasn't onscreen we saw very scary photos of people wearing surgical masks. We had a killer disease on our hands, which allowed us -- temporarily -- to forget about all the less romantic peril in our lives.

Even our vice president got in on the game, warning folks not to take public transportation or fly on airplanes, and this allowed for a whole new cycle of news centered on why Vice President Biden always says things that other people are thinking -- a verboten practice among Washington elites.

But by the weekend, it was clear that our deadly flu epidemic mega-story lacked one important thing: Deaths.

[S]cientists studying the virus are coming to the consensus that this hybrid strain of influenza -- at least in its current form -- isn't shaping up to be as fatal as the strains that caused some previous pandemics.

In fact, the current outbreak of the H1N1 virus, which emerged in San Diego and southern Mexico late last month, may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu outbreaks that occur each winter without much fanfare.

To date, one person in the U.S. has died from this strain of flu. This is obviously horrible news for his family, but it means we are pretty far from a raging modern version of the bubonic plague.

So now the news out of Washington is of the exceedingly dull, "Wash your hands, and use a Kleenex instead of sneezing into the open air like a cretin" variety.

America deserves better. If we cannot have our deadly airborne pig-death plague, we should at least have news coverage that suggests we are in peril.

The noted epidemiologist and pig farmer Sara K. Smith writes for NBC and Wonkette.