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.