I first heard about swine flu in April, sitting having a coffee in St Pancras station, near my office. I read a small item in a specialist newsletter I get by email, called Daily Virology News, headlined "Two cases of swine flu in Orange County, California." The two main vaccines in use now are named after them, because they were the first two cases that were picked up.
Initially I didn't think swine flu was serious. The real problem would have been, and still is, a bird flu pandemic. An H5N1 outbreak would have been a huge global health emergency and would have shaken the planet, and cost who knows how many lives.
Swine flu has been relatively mild, but it has killed about 9,000 people worldwide, including several hundred in the UK, and left others seriously ill. It's a relatively mild virus, but has a nasty sting in its tail – one that's being stuck into pregnant women, children under four and obese people. The number of deaths of children has caught people's attention and made them anxious. But remember that 25,000 people in the UK died of seasonal flu in the winter of 1999-2000, mainly the elderly, and nobody seemed to care about that.
I took Tamiflu as a preventative measure in Cairo in the summer, when I woke up feeling unwell after visiting a chicken market the day before. The Tamiflu didn't affect me at all, perhaps because I took it with a biscuit, as you're meant to. Taking Tamiflu is like taking an aspirin for a headache; it's a safe drug.
I haven't had the swine flu jab yet because I'm not in a risk group; but as soon as I can get it, I will. About 80m people worldwide have been vaccinated with it so far and no one has died as a result. People shouldn't worry about taking it, including pregnant women.
Air travel means that modern societies are more vulnerable to pandemics than before, because it has made the world so small. as John Donne said, "No man is an island." So problems in Mexico soon became problems in America, then Scotland, England and Spain.
My greatest fear is that the virus will mutate next year, to enable it to infect older people. If it does, then the death rate next year will be much worse than this, perhaps even as high as the winter of 1999-2000. Remember that between a third and a half of all people who have ended up in intensive care with swine flu were previously completely well; they weren't asthmatics or on chemotherapy. While the pandemic has been fairly mild here, I think it will kill off for ever the notion (among doctors and the public alike) around influenza that "Oh, it's only flu". I hope that will be swine flu's lasting legacy.