Could a reason for the panicky reaction to the swine flu outbreak be that it diverted our attention, however briefly, from the devastating effects of the global financial crisis, not to mention the myriad chronic health issues that threaten millions of lives?

Or is it simply human nature to overreact to threats over which we have little control?

“The fact is that we love to be scared,” argue two British statisticians, Simon Briscoe and Hugh Aldersey-Williams, in Panicology, published in the United States this year by Skyhorse Publishing. Witness the immense popularity of disaster movies and thrillers.

“But there are serious emotional, social and economic costs to panic,” said Briscoe, a London-based economist for The Financial Times. “We’d be a lot happier if we insisted that people prove their case before making dire pronouncements. We shouldn’t be wasting time worrying about a lot of stupid things, and should focus instead on hazards we can do something about.”

It’s the wisdom to know the difference — swine flu was new, potentially fatal and spreading — that is hard to come by. We are bombarded by government and media reports of real or potential dangers, magnified to panic mode by “24-hour rolling news from around the world,” the authors wrote.

They point in particular to the panic in 2005 and 2006 over bird flu, “billed as an impending human pandemic that would wipe out a large proportion of the Earth’s population.”

Yet in the end, this flu virus has killed fewer than 300 people worldwide, most of whom were in direct contact with infected birds. Hardly worth the worry when “ordinary” seasonal flu claims more than 30,000 American lives each winter.

... contd.