This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy stayed home,
This little piggy is sneezing,
He's got Swine Flu! We're all going to die! Quick, run for the hills, not those hills, the other hills! Agh! Its the end of civilisation as we know it!

This is the scenario that the media would have us believe is happening all over the world. A few cases of a new-ish strain of flu, and all of a sudden, words like "pandemic", "armageddon" and..."Mexico" are being thrown about with gay abandon. It seems as if every news outlet is dominated with tales of the most recent outbreaks, despite the worldwide death toll allegedly hovering around 100 - less than the annual rate of golfing umbrella accidents.

This media hysteria, which I will call "Swine Flu Fever", has somehow managed to avoid causing panic and mass rioting. Most of the people I know have been completely unphased by the growing number of cases worldwide - we survived Bird Flu, SARS and Fat Duck virus, so we feel mildly impervious to such things. Besides, Swine Flu is a perfect excuse to drag out all the worst pig puns with a completely new context: "I phoned NHS Direct, and all I got was crackling". Finally, I personally am unable to hear "H1N1" without thinking "You sunk my battleship!".

So why have the news media latched onto this situation like a Jack Russell clamping onto your unmentionables? There is of course the old adage that "Bad New Sells", but the Credit Crunch has provided plenty of bad news over the last 18 months, so there seems to be little reason to move onto something new and untested. There, however, is the possibility that the health correspondants have been getting jealous of Robert Peston and wanted a shot at the limelight.

I do have another theory, one that may shed light on a conspiracy bigger than Armstrong overexposing the Moon Landing photos on the way home and having to re-shoot everything after they got back like an episode of a predictable sitcom. The fear of Swine Flu is being blown out of proportion as a joint venture between the sellers of surgical masks and the Associated Press, their dastardly hope being that they can scare everyone into staying at home with their mouths covered, ensuring that surgical masks become an essential consumable...and journalists can get a seat on the tube in the morning.