Things I was/should be afriad of.

I wrote in an earlier blog post that we all secretly want to be afraid and the media/government obliges us.

Today I got my swine flu shot (didn't hurt at all, but later felt like someone punched my shoulder). It's still all over the news - how the swine flu is going to kill us all because there are vaccine shortages.

I thought, "What diseases/sicknesses did the media try to make us afraid of in the 80s and 90s?"

Well, I'd say it was AIDS in the 1980s. When I was in elementary school everyone was going to die of AIDS. Guaranteed. Then AIDS faded away to "HIV", which became controllable by a cocktail of drugs.

Then in the 90s I had trouble remembering what I was afraid of. Of course I was in university, largely oblivious to world events. Too young to be worried about anything in particular.

Someone said it was Mad Cow disease. Or Ebola virus. Or the autism explosion. My co-worker said there were a whole bunch of food poisoning concerns in the 1990s. E-coli, etc.

Then in the 2000s it became a series of exotic flu diseases SARS, bird flu, swine flu.

What sickness is next? I want to know what I should fear.

I haven't come across people who trust the swine flu vaccine.

When did we stop trusting vaccines?

I've only come across a few people who've said categorically that they're going to get the swine flu vaccine.

(Mind you, I haven't asked a lot of people - so this is very small sample. Still, with the eradication of small pox and other old fashioned diseases, you'd think people would WANT to get vaccinated from swine flu.)

Part of this distrust toward vaccines has been because of the faulty science of the purported link to autism.

People also say stuff like, "I never get sick and as soon as I got the flu shot, I caught the flu." They're suggesting that the flu shot either gave them the flu or made them more susceptible to the flu.

A few weeks back my Mom sent me an article that basically said the scientists developing the vaccine are bumbling idiots who have no idea what they're doing.

And you can read lots of articles that say things like, "The swine flu vaccine in the 1970s killed more people than the flu itself."

Okay, but how many people did it save?

No vaccine is 100% effective. And all vaccines carry risks. But - the benefits far, far outweigh the risks. Or so I'm told.

I don't know anyone who has smallpox.