WAURIKA — Are you still avoiding ham sandwiches? Denying yourself bacon with the morning eggs? When a delectable pork loin roast appears on the dinner table, is your first thought: Ohmygawd, I could wake up tomorrow with swine flu?

Still walking around with little bottles of antiseptic soap in every pocket? Still wearing a surgical mask 24/7?

Or have you filed the H1N1 flu virus away in your brain’s file folder, right behind avian flu and mad cow disease? You know, the cerebral drawer marked “Pandemics that never pandemed”?

It’s now been 2-1/2 months since first reports of an unknown influenza virus came out of Mexico and tripped the plant-wide the pandemic warning system.

Unfortunately — very unfortunately — over 70 people have died in Mexico, after contracting what was first labeled “swine flu” and later was given the clinical name H1N1 virus. Worldwide, there have been more than 11,000 confirmed cases of H1N1 and 90 to 100 deaths, including 10 in the U.S.

That’s sad, very sad. But let’s face it, those numbers are far, far short of “pandemic.”

In fact, there’s a big exhale in the public square. Do you and your friends talk about “swine flu” anymore? Don’t you feel a little silly for shying away from the pork section at the grocery store?

Wouldn’t you like to fire off a nasty letter or e-mail to TV announcers on the 24-hour news channels and major networks? The ones whose reporting on the initial outbreak of H1N1 was necessary, but who then turned every newscast into breathless forecasts of doom; who seemed in competition to be first to declare a pandemic and elbowed one another aside to report confirmations and death counts.

Much like avian flu and mad cow disease, the media’s handling of the H1N1 virus became less about reporting news and more about wanting to be the first to proclaim disaster.

Still, one good thing has come from the H1N1 virus non-pandemic: It’s reaffirmed that the worldwide medical community — and, yes, the media — can spring to action when a health disaster looms.

And something else positive can come from this “swine flu” experience: It should prompt us to continue striving to separate panic from planning.

In a 2005 article for the New England Journal of Medicine, Michael Osterholm called for a “worldwide influenza Manhattan Project” to devise a better strategy than we currently have for coping with a catastrophic pandemic — which too often is limited to freaking out, spreading misinformation and looking for someone to blame.

Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, was calling then — and continues to call — for a method of mass producing vaccines that’s less cumbersome then what we have now, which is a holdover from the 1950s.

Lab capacity for manufacturing vaccines is limited. Detailed community plans for treating patients are improving but are still sadly lacking in many areas of the U.S. and around the globe. There aren’t enough supplies available — from syringes to ventilators — to address a widespread, virulent infection.

In a recent interview on Minnesota Public Radio, Osterholm also cited what he calls the “collateral damage” of panic and unpreparedness. “How people react to a pandemic is often as dangerous, if not more deadly, than the pandemic itself,” he said.

In Mexico City, grocery shelves were stripped bare by frightened residents and water supplies ran low. People were “buying drugs they didn’t even need, just to have drugs,” Osterholm noted.

Osterholm also chided the media for keeping hour-by-hour count of cases during the early stages of the H1N1 scare, “but never really having a substantive discussion on ‘What can we do to be better prepared?’”

These are topics we need to keep tossing around in the public forum. Even though the spring outbreak of “swine flu” was mild, Osterholm and others acknowledge the H1N1 virus is still out there and could raise its head again in the fall.

And there’s historic proof one of these “non-pandemics” will eventually turn out to be the real thing.