I was telling someone the other day that H1N1 is seen as being not that big of a deal, and if another one or two pan out that way, then the next one after that will kill a lot of people because they start thinking that it was a 'cry wolf' sort of situation.

Look at the situation with vaccines. Your grandparents getting vaccines was a no-brainer. They heard stories of people getting polio or the measles and it was serious shit. Three generations later we have conspiracy theories about vaccines, I think because so few iminently deadly diseases have gotten a vaccine lately. We are down to the tricky ones, and cultural memory of the others is starting to crack.