According to the World Health Organization:

Most people who get influenza (ANY FLU) will recover in one to two weeks, but others will develop life-threatening complications (such as pneumonia). According to the World Health Organization: “Every winter, tens of millions of people get the flu. Most are only ill and out of work for a week, yet the elderly are at a higher risk of death from the illness. We know the worldwide death toll exceeds a few hundred thousand people a year,but even in developed countries the numbers are uncertain, because medical authorities don’t usually verify who actually died of influenza and who died of a flu-like illness.

So, if hundreds of people die of the flu every year - why the panic now over swine flu? Because it MIGHT be a pandemic. MIGHT. Pandemics kill MILLIONS of people - not a dozen. As influenza is caused by a variety of species and strains of viruses, in any given year some strains can die out while others create epidemics, while yet another strain can cause a pandemic. Typically, in a year’s normal two flu seasons (one per hemisphere), there are between three and five million cases of severe illness and up to 500,000 deaths worldwide, which by some definitions is a yearly influenza epidemic.

Although the incidence of influenza can vary widely between years, approximately 36,000 deaths and more than 200,000 hospitalizations are directly associated with influenza every year in America. Every ten to twenty years, a pandemic occurs, which infects a large proportion of the world’s population and can kill tens of millions of people. Indeed, if a strain with similar virulence to the 1918 influenza emerged today, it could kill between 50 to 80 million people. YET - the last time the panic around Swine Flu happened more than 25 people died from the vaccine - only ONE, a baby, died from the swine flu (In the U.S.)

If there is truly a concern, why is the US still allowing flights and travel to and from Mexico?? NO travel advisory? Before you hunker down in your home and wait for the world to end - think about what’s happening. NONE of the handful of Americans with swine flu were even hospitalized. NONE. ALL have recovered. While the deaths in Mexico are reported to be of young, healthy adults - much like what tips folks off to a pandemic in the past - the fact is, people who have been exposed to the flu repeatedly DO have an immunity to it.