The swine flu has yet to reach pandemic proportions, but that hasn’t slowed the progression of worldwide panic and excessive media attention.

According to the World Health Organization, the number of confirmed swine flu cases has reached at least 2,000. The Mexican government has reported a total of 44 deaths, and in the United States there are 385 people infected with the virus.

While these numbers have been blasted across media headlines alongside fear-evoking terms like “world-wide pandemic” and “global threat,” the truth remains that the most prominent effect of the swine flu to date has been that on the global economy.

As if the fear of the drug cartels hasn’t already put a dent in Mexican tourism, the country where the virus was first detected has lost a total of $2 billion in tourism revenue. Over 300,000 pigs have been unnecessarily slaughtered in Egypt, regardless of the fact that the virus cannot be transmitted from animals to humans. The devastation on the Egyptian farm workers led to violent protests in the streets of Cairo. The Mexican and American pork industries have also felt strong financial blows as many countries including China, Canada and Russia have banned imports due to swine flu fears.

While it is always safe to err on the side of precaution when facing a new virus strain, it is equally necessary to consider the current threat before persuading billions of people into taking apocalyptic measures.

Every year an estimated 36,000 people die from the influenza virus. In fact, since January more than 13,000 people have died from the common flu strain; these deaths being of no newsworthy interest.

The media has had the strongest hand in the perpetuation of false ideas regarding the swine flu and are responsible for much of the general hysteria.

Some media sources have compared this new strain to the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed an estimated 70-100 million people. Health officials maintain that the possibility of the swine flu reaching such catastrophic proportions is highly unlikely, especially given the current number of infected individuals and the low percentage of deaths that have occurred.

When the World Health Organization released the number of deaths that could occur should there be a pandemic, the media presented those numbers as an imminent threat of inevitable doom. The Associated Press released a headline on Thursday stating “Up to 2 billion people might get swine flu.” The media is notorious for taking facts out of context but writing a whole article based on a hypothetical situation just seems like uninformed fear mongering.

It took only days after the virus’s detection for the media to integrate the word “pandemic” into most people’s daily vocabulary, but how long will it take to undo the damage that has been done to the economy by excessive reporting and false information?

The deaths caused by the swine flu are tragic, but the confusion between the current situation and a hypothetical pandemic is generating a gross overreaction that will do nothing but worsen the current situation. It is time for the general population to understand not only the actual dangers of the new flu strain, but the devastating outcomes that can be had by worldwide panic and overreaction.