I am in Bombay and there is indeed a scare of some kind going around. N95 masks are selling at 5 times the normal price. The media echo chamber is in scare mo

I am in Bombay and there is indeed a scare of some kind going around. N95 masks are selling at 5 times the normal price. The media echo chamber is in scare mode. All my newspaper front page headlines have been about swine flu since quite a few days. All the same, TFA sort of misses the point. While 325k people here might die of malaria every year, nobody in my friend of friends and in their extended family has died of malaria in recent times. All of them know exactly what to do if they caught malaria and how to avoid getting it in the first place. Right now, none of them would know what to do if they caught swine flu. Also, in this sample, statistically speaking, everyone probably has more of a chance of dying of swine flu rather than malaria (even though both the chances are pretty much negligible). All I am saying is that that comparison to malaria was a bit misleading.