The post you are reporting:
A consideration is that infection with a 'flu can lead on to all kinds of nasties. That includes ME/CFS, with which some 250,000 people in this country are currently disabled, 25% permanently bed-bound.
Publicity is a fickle beast, and it's not what's important, or "news", but the angle of the story, what a good publicist can get into the media, and also, may I suggest, the simplicity of the story so that most people can easily understand it, marvel at it, and even identify with it.
That brings me back to ME/CFS. The thousands of people with it, who can merely live quietly on the sidelines of life, watching others live theirs, and for whom there is no cure, are hardly newsworthy. Yet I'd suggest it's tantamount to a national scandal that so little research is being done, because even now it still can be seen as all in the mind, and that the only "cures" offered for this severe and debilitating physical illness are strategies which can often exacerbate the illness, or management.
I'd agree; we seem over the top at the moment on the reporting of the swine 'flu. Nevertheless, 'flu, of whatever strain, should never be underestimated, and people do die. Maybe if this swine 'flu does sweep the country, we won't have the death rates, as currently in Mexico. But through it and others more people will be condemned to a living death. We won't hear much about them, though. They're not newsworthy.