It’s official, I have SARS. I say this with great sarcasm, because the media is portraying this as the apocolypse. In reality, SARS has officially killed 182 people. I don’t mean to sound like an ass, though some will argue I always sound like an ass, but 182 out of 5,000,000,000 (billion) seems like a molecule in the bucket (not even a drop!).

I hate it when the media gets hysterical over stuff like this. Nevermind the 40,000,000 (million) people who are infected with HIV/AIDS, 9 percent of which live in poverty in Africa. Also, don’t think about the 500,000 women who died globally of breast cancer in 1997 (the last year such data is available globally). And definitely don’t mention the 10 million people the World Health Organization estimates will die in the next 25 years from tobacco related deaths (70% of that number is made up of people living in developing countries).

My point here? My point is that CNN is more worried about covering the plight of 182 people than the harsh realities of the true epidemics that we face today. It seems even more stupid than the attack of “Africanized Bees” that “rocked” the news a few years ago. As a friend of mine says “Don’t hate the media, be the media!”