Can we just start the bloody pandemic, already?

Hey, have you heard about this 'avian flu' thing? I heard the Pope's got it. Yup. He contracted it from his cardinals.
All frivolity aside, I'm so sick and tired of H5N1 you'd think I had it. The media have really gone apeshit over this one, haven't they? A week can't go by without somebody on television blurting out how woefully unprepared the world is for the coming scourge.
Well, the world's unprepared for a whole lot of things. I just found out that almost one in three North American homeowners is living in more house than they can afford: a few upward jogs in the interest rates and they'll find out. The price at the pumps this morning was $1.069 a litre, this on speculation that we might have a bad hurricane season. Better hope that's not true. If the supply of oil is really so unstable that a little speculation can drive up the price by ten cents a litre, think what a real bevy of hurricanes would do. I think it's obvious: we've scaled Peak Oil and are starting the downward slide. Are we prepared for that? Hell, no.
One of the points Michael Crichton made in his novel State of Fear was that media use of words like 'disaster', 'calamity' and 'catastrophe' doubled in the years immediately following 1989, and doubled again since. Nothing much happened in 1989...just the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, that handy-dandy construct that kept people nice and tractably uneasy. Obviously, new boogeymen were required when Ivan abdicated his post.
Several nosefuls of boogeyman have conveniently arrived. We have the 9/11 strain, which--if you believe the mediocracy to the south of us--is pretty much everywhere by now, maybe even ON YOUR STREET! The weather boogey is just as dreadful, but has the advantage of being nearly infinitely adaptable: every last cold front can be milked for STORMWATCH segments, of course, but if the sun insists on coming out, we can concentrate on the UV ratings.
And now avian influenza H5N1.
It hasn't killed anyone in Canada yet--imagine the orgy of excess if and when (WHEN! WHEN!!!!) it does--but it's coming. It's coming for you.
Are you scared yet? Or are you bored, like me?
The damnedest thing is that this endless howling of the media wolf deafens us to the real problems in the world--some of the very same ones they're howling about, even. Take the weather, for example. It's clearly gone squirrelly. But just how squirrelly it's gone can be difficult to suss out when it's always too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry. We live in The World Of Too. How much is too Too?
Perhaps the problem is mine. Like a junkie who knows how bad the smack is for him but doesn't care, I continue to read newspapers, listen to the radio, and watch television newscasts...far more, I suspect, than most people. So I'm pretty quick to call overexposure. (I'm the same guy who once said there oughta be a law that limited commericals to, say, one hundred appearances each.) What shows up on the 680 News morning wheel before I go to work is old hat by that evening's Global National, and positively ancient in the next day's Post.
But all the same, do they have to hammer avian flu quite so hard? When it hasn't so much as taken a little nibble out of our population? By all means, prepare for it--I'm not saying it might not develop into an issue. Hell, it might even approach the Armageddon scenario it's been worked up into. But do we have to be treated to endless breathless wall to wall floor to ceiling coverage?

I think not.