April 29, 2009

Death Fatigue

Despite all the lurid headlines, pardon me if I don't get too hysterical over swine flu.

You see, I'm living on borrowed time. I'm playing with house money.

By now, I should have been long dead from SARS, or bird flu, or mad cow disease, or ebola virus, or Legionaire's disease. You remember those, don't you? They were the other "pandemics" that were going to kill us all.

They didn't actually do the trick, but they did sell a bunch of newspapers and gave CNN lots to be frantic about.

Here's the deal.

In the U.S., 36,000 people die every year from the flu. So until the death rate from this latest "cataclysm" gets above 100 people a day, there's no story here as far as I'm concerned.

I'm getting a little tired of dying.