Squirrel flu?

Boy, this makes me mad. Every single year, we're preached fear and panic. Millions will be dead! Corpses will litter the lawns! Better stock up on fresh water, marshmallows and skin magazines! We're an embarrassingly gullible bunch. And then, of course, another trusted institution, in this case pharmaceuticals, slips even further into disdain. What the hell's left for us to trust?

From Slate.com:

WHO Exaggerated Swine Flu Threat

Back-to-back reports released on Friday claim that the World Health Organization dramatically exaggerated the threat of an H1N1 epidemic, and that the recommendations it issued were written by experts with ties to big pharmaceutical companies. In the months after H1N1 broke out in April 2009, the World Health Organization labeled the flu a "pandemic" and advised governments to spend billions on stockpiling vaccines. The virus turned out to be relatively mild, and governments aren't happy about haven taken what turned out to be unnecessary precautions. A report by the Council of Europe accused the WHO of turning the epidemic into a scare story and wasting enormous amounts of money in the process. "The WHO changed the definition of the most serious pandemic for one that would include the possibility of a tremendous amount of deaths to one that wouldn't include that severity ... and this is extraordinary," author Paul Flynn told Al Jazeera. Another report published in the British Medical Journal offers an explanation for why the WHO responded so strongly: its guidelines were written by public health experts who worked as consultants for Roche and GlaxoSmithKline—the two main manufacturers of H1N1 drugs. The WHO has denied any wrongdoing, and has convened an emergency committee to track the virus' development around the world. Swine flu has been rated a phase six pandemic—the highest possible ranking—since June of last year.