Looking Back on the H1N1 Scare

I had just moved to Chicago to study at a university downtown when the H1N1 scare started making daily headlines. Coming from a small town, and this being my first time living in a big city, I was a little disturbed to see people riding on the Blue Line subway wearing those face masks you see in hospitals. Then again, I never got sick from the thing, and even though a handful of my friends supposedly did back home, it never seemed like it was as big of a deal as the media and the World Health Organization tried to make it seem.

A new report from the Social Health and Family Affairs Committee of PACE (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe) is shedding some light on some "exaggerations" that may have been put forth during the H1N1 Scare, calling it "unjustified" and a "waste of money". Maybe everyone was just being cautious (or maybe the government just needed to do a massive test of some other drug that they snuck into the H1N1 vaccine-right?). Or, maybe we're all just a little too worried and paranoid in our society from post-9/11 anxieties. We live in a strange and frightening world where we feel the need to look both ways twice before crossing the street, and I think that's just fine. However, the daily stress that can come from constant worry over super-hyped-up-hyperbolized-media-nonsense can take a toll on a person's well-being and overall happiness. And it doesn't help that the WHO was egging us on the whole time.

My suggestion is to keep a skeptical mind. Take the necessary precautions, and keep an eye out for symptoms when the next big scare comes around, but don't let it stop you from living healthily, happily, and actively. Double check the facts you hear on the news and be open to different sources for your daily feed of information. This is common sense in an age when anything can be published on the Internet, but we need to realize that things get skewed even in the largest news corporations. Are we just living in another age of yellow journalism?