Fear mongering: diseased pigs and crashing stock markets

Today I woke up with a short-lived tightening in my chest, which immediately made me think if maybe I had been to Mexico recently and had simply forgotten.
I have never been to Mexico.
Then I thought the tightness may be due to stress caused by the state of the stock market.
I don't own stock in anything and never have.
In the end, the cause of the pain in my chest was that I had slept for several hours on my stomach, with the remote control for my TV pressing into my ribs.
However, the fact that the state of the stock market and the possibility of contracting the suddenly everywhere flu worried me, well, worried me.
Sure, I have an appropriate amount of concern over the faltering economy, but it doesn't keep me up at night and I have no immediate plans to jump off a tall building.
I also have no reason to worry about falling ill with this pig-carried flu because there have been only a handful of cases of it in Canada so far and they've all been pretty mild.
So why even think about it?
It's pretty hard not to, I'd say, thanks to this culture of fear mongering that has suddenly begun rolling again with renewed vigour.
Sure, it's pretty shitty that a bunch of Mexicans have died from this, until recently, fairly rare flu that has managed to hope over the border into our country, and several others. But at the same time, the comparisons between it and the Spanish flu that killed 50 million people is a little over the top, at this point anyway. Suggesting that people may want to rethink trips to Mexico for the time being is a good call, a solid precaution. But I'm sure as hell not going to start going to the gym wearing a surgical mask. Not yet anyway. But people are starting to do things like that, and for once I will blame the media. As a journalist, that is something I rarely do, but I have found the reporting on the swine flu so focused on scaring the shit out of people that most articles and news clips have largely ignored specific details about the illness. I didn't know anything about the associated symptoms of swine flu until after the first few days. Info like that was hardly ever mentioned. All I heard was "this could turn into a global pandemic, we're all doomed, blah blah blah".
That's not helping, it's just going to freak more people out.