And the award for the most overblown news story of 2009 goes to, drumroll, the fucking pig flu. It seemed to first get attention after some nut in Mexico reported that 150 people had died from the so called “swine flu”, this number was downgraded late last week to, umm 7. Mexican math fail. They were also reporting something like 700 cases, of which only about 300 actually had the flu, the rest were just Mexican.

Feral-albino-Mexican-hog flu seems to be worked into each and every news item, with the media doing whatever the fuck they can to drive the fear of death into the general populous. I don’t believe that this “threat” is any more serious that the bird flu “threat” from a couple of years ago, but the main difference this time is that it might affect Americans. Poor things. Here I was thinking they only cared about oil.

The Prime Minister of Israel suggested it should be known as “Mexican Flu” due to their religious beliefs about pigs being dirty, he later withdrew his comments after he’d figured they were probably offensive towards Mexicans.

Last night on the longest running, and most reliable current affairs program in this country (if there can be such a thing) they had some so-called expert predicting that if nothing is done that 40% of the world’s population would get sick form the flu. Yeah right, whatever you reckon, the only way that 2.68 billion people are going to catch pig flu is if they start adding it to the water supply. Someone pointed out to me on twitter that the Spanish flu affected 50% of the population, but that was a century ago… somehow I think 40% in this day and age is virtually impossible.

The name “swine flu” is stupid, and its convinced the ‘simple’ folk that they should stop eating pork products. It’s not Mad-cow disease, so unless your pork steak sneezes on you, you’re going to be fine. The Prime Minister of Israel suggested it should be known as “Mexican Flu” due to their religious beliefs about pigs being dirty (which they are, but fuck me they taste good), he later withdrew his comments after he’d figured they were probably offensive towards Mexicans. Officially it is supposed to be called something lame like H1N1 Influenza, but seriously how many media outlets are going to adopt that?

The experts have being saying that “we’re just days away from a pandemic”… and they’ve been saying that for nearly two weeks. Mr Pandemic, I’m still waiting, if you don’t arrive I can’t justify my in-progress screenplay title “Phase 6: The Day Swine Flu”.

How about the world goes back to focusing on the things that are actually killing much more significant portions of the population, you know, things like cancer, AIDS and heart disease. Just a thought.

So if you’ve got a sore throat, runny nose, general aches and pains, blocked nose, headache etc stop worrying, there’s a 99.9% chance you’ve just got this thing called a common cold. Suck it up, stop being such a whiny bitch, and go and eat some bacon.