Just when you thought it was safe to toss out the plastic sheeting and duct tape you’ve been hoarding since 9/11, the world’s health experts have come up with something new for you to be afraid of. Seems like our friends in Mexico are not content with wiping themselves out in a nasty drug war - it takes too much time, and those bullets cost money you know. So instead, they have apparently moved on to hanging around with pigs and coughing on each other.

And although the recent “Swine Flu” scare might seem like something new, it’s really not. It’s just another variation on the “mass death by silent microorganism” scenario that’s been with us for dozens of years. A couple of decades ago it was known as the Hong Kong flu, then we had the Avian or “Bird” flu panic just a few years back. And in between, we were all supposed to get wiped out by Mad Cow disease - none of which happened.

All this fuss also serves as a clever distraction for everything else that’s going on right now. The Obama Administration would like you to spend more time worrying about catching Swine Flu than about the Gazillions of dollars they are pouring down the national financial rathole in order to try and jerk the economy back to life. Besides, all this gives the national Centers for Disease Control some visibility and something to do. Their officials come down out of their ivory tower and put their public service hats on and stand in front of the cameras pretending they are actually in control of the situation. When in reality, the only things they really control are the Billions of dollars we waste every year on bloated and ineffective government agencies like the CDC, and the FDA, and FEMA.

In the fall of every year, the CDC starts hounding the American public about getting flu shots. Which is inevitably followed by a “shortage” of supply, which helps nicely to drive up the demand for flu shots even more. Then, around the first of the year, the CDC announces that the current flu strain has “mutated”, meaning that the current flu vaccine they’ve been jabbing folks in the arm with for six months will be ineffective against it. Seems like every year this is the same scenario, over and over - and how that passes for “disease control” is certainly beyond me.

And of course, there are still those folks out there that believe every sneeze is the result of some biological attack by Al-Qaeda, or a faulty product from China, or some Russian bio-electric satellite gizmo. In the post-9/11 world, every unpleasant event is seen as a potential terrorist attack. We spend so much time on the edge of our seats, it’s no wonder we keep slipping off and falling on our face. And the current panic is over the flu - maybe a newer variation than we’re used to, but still just the flu. It’s not the Black Death and it’s not Nuclear Annihilation, it’s just a new stain of an unpleasant viral disease that used to be called the “grippe”.

So get a grip.