The so-far mild swine flu outbreak has many people saying all the talk about a devastating global epidemic was just fear-mongering hype. But that’s not how public health officials see it, calling complacency the thing that keeps them up at night.

The World Health Organization added a scary-sounding warning Thursday, predicting up to 2 billion people could catch the new flu if the outbreak turns into a global epidemic. Many blame such alarms and the breathless media coverage for creating an overreaction that disrupted many people’s lives. Schools shut down, idling even healthy kids and forcing parents to stay home from work; face masks and hand sanitizers sold out – all because of an outbreak that seems no worse than a mild flu season.

Two weeks after news broke about the new flu strain, there have been 46 deaths – 44 in Mexico and two in the United States. More than 2,300 are sick in 26 countries, including about 900 U.S. cases. Eight patients under investigation in England have today been confirmed with swine flu, bringing the current total number of confirmed UK cases to 47.Those are much lower numbers than were feared at the start based on early reports of an aggressive and deadly flu in Mexico.

Despite the grim nature of these reports some have tried to raise awareness on this issue  in a fun way, using Youtube , as shown in the video below.

Public health authorities acknowledge their worst fears about the new virus have not materialized. But no one’s officially saying it’s time to relax. And experts worry that people will become too complacent and tune out the warnings if the virus returns in a more dangerous form in the fall.

Whether or not the current outbreak of swine flu translates into a world pandemic, we are already seeing information and and data spreading around the web at a staggering pace.

Many news organisations around the world today are linking to a Google map showing almost live data on reported cases. Whilst this may be a very useful tool, what few of the news organisations report is that it appears to have been created by Henry Niman, a biomedical researcher with a history of using the internet to forecast doom. Niman has claimed global pandemics were under way several times before.

The speed at which information travels brings opportunities and threats and we need to treat information we see on line with caution and respect.  The social web will deliver information on which we can rely and data which will sometimes deceive.