Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

The single biggest challenge (so far) about swine flu is that the two questions your brain most badly wants answered are technically unanswerable: 1. What are my chances of getting it? 2. What are my chances of dying?

Our brains are wired to ask those questions. They are damn good questions. But no one really knows the answer (more on why that is coming soon). In the meantime, the trick is to make an educated guess. And that we can do pretty easily.

A bunch of people have emailed me lately to ask for help with the educated guess. I’m no doctor, but I’ve been fairly well immersed in studying swine flu (formally known as pandemic H1N1 of 2009) for a couple months now, as those of you following me on Twitter know a little too well. And I know a bit about how the brain processes risk—and the mistakes we tend to make. So here’s what I think:

1. Should I get the regular seasonal flu shot?

I would. It will be available earlier than usual this year, and even though it offers no protection against swine flu, it is a good way to hedge your bets. Why? Well, swine flu (the other flu) is extremely infectious—so your chances of getting it may be relatively high. If you get it,  you will almost certainly recover. It is milder than regular seasonal flu so far. But it will kind of suck to be sick as a dog for a week to 10 days. If you get the seasonal flu shot, you at least reduce your chances of being sick as a dog twice this year. Plus, the truth is, too many people die or get hospitalized from seasonal flu in an ordinary year. So might as well not be one of them.

And let’s be clear: there’s no evidence that you can get the flu from the flu shot. The shot contains a killed, inactive version of the virus. The flu mist nasal spray contains a live version, but it is very weak. You may get a low-grade fever for a day or two, if you’re unlucky, but nothing like the actual flu. This thing is pretty well studied at this point, and it is very safe. I plan to get it, as I usually do. I figure my life is frantic enough without getting knocked flat by an optional virus.

2. Should I get the H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine when it comes out later this fall?

I will be getting it. I am not a health care worker or pregnant, under age 25, diabetic, asthmatic or dealing with any of the other chronic conditions that put people at higher risk. So I don’t want to take someone else’s dose. But once it’s widely available, which will probably be in November or so, I plan to get it.

It’s being manufactured the same way the regular seasonal flu vaccine is manufactured. Every year, the flu vaccine is altered to address different strains. So this is the same deal: same vaccine shell for a different strain. Also, it is being tested all summer by regular (if weirdly generous) people, and that includes pregnant women, small children and the elderly.

3. What about my kids? Should I get the vaccines for them, too?

This one is the easiest question, actually. Children are at higher risk when it comes to both kinds of flu (swine and seasonal). So as long as they are over 6 mos old and don’t have a severe allergy to chicken eggs, it makes sense to get them vaccinated for both. If they have any underlying issues—like diabetes or asthma—it is even more urgent.

OK, take a deep breath: For some kids, this may mean getting 4 different doses in all… Kids need two shots of regular flu vaccine the first year they get the shot (and only one seasonal flu shot after that)—and may need two shots of the new, H1N1 vaccine, too. This sounds unreasonable, I know. But it will probably be easier than ever to get these shots this year. Lots of schools, stores, pharmacies and doctor’s offices will be offering them. Also, the feds are paying for the H1N1 vaccine, so you should only have to pay a small administrative fee (or nothing, if your insurance covers it).

Lots of people are worried about thimerosal (a preservative) in vaccines. I’m not going to get in the weeds here on this very passionate debate, but I will say that both vaccines will be offered to children in thimerosal-free versions. So hopefully this won’t be a big issue. If you want to know more about the thimerosal debate, I recommend How Safe are Vaccines? by my Time colleague Alice Park.

For anyone trying to convince someone else (say a spouse or a grandparent) that the flu shot is a good idea for a child, you could always have them watch this CDC video. Once you’ve seen it, it’s hard to forget… And I know it’s kind of a cheap shot, because stories are always more compelling than stats (and the fact is that the number of kids who die from flu each year is pretty small—compared to, say, the four kids who die every day in car crashes in the U.S.). But still. There is a time and a place for manipulative storytelling, and this may not be a bad time and place:

4. What if I’m pregnant? Or thinking about getting pregnant?

So far, pregnant women have represented 6% of the people who have died from pandemic H1N1, according to the CDC. Pregnant women have also represented 6% of those hospitalized with the virus. But pregnant women only actually represent 1% of the population. So you can see that they are at higher risk of having serious issues from this otherwise moderate bug.

That said, if you are pregnant, your chances of having problems are still pretty small. If I were pregnant, I would get the vaccine as soon as it becomes available (likely mid-October). As I mentioned, it is being tested on pregnant women right now. And it is almost identical to the regular seasonal flu vaccine, which pregnant women are also supposed to get.

It’s hard to say if there’s enough risk to delay getting pregnant until the vaccine comes out… But since it’s coming out in a month, maybe it’s not such a hard question. Still, keep in mind that it will take 3 weeks for you to develop immunity—starting from the day you get your shot. Why? Because it takes a few weeks for your body to develop immunity.

5. So what’s the big deal?

Flu viruses are crafty bastards. They can change at any time. So the best defense is wisdom. You don’t need to worry about it as long as you check in with a few different, reliable sources of information every so often. What is a reliable source when it comes to swine flu? I can tell you that it’s generally not TV news. This thing is too nuanced for segments that last 52 seconds. But pick a couple sources—ideally ones that don’t all link to each other. My own favorites:

FLU.GOV (the federal government’s site)
FLUWIKI (a collaborative problem-solving wiki site)
THE PETER M. SANDMAN RISK COMMUNICATION SITE (a great site by an expert in risk communication—who has been following H1N1 closer than 99% of the population. Also, he’s funny, honest and blunt.)

A British PSA illustrating the ramifications of texting while driving has been making waves not in Wales where it was produced, but in the US via YouTube and major news outlets.  This isn’t your average “this-is-your-brain-on-drugs” PSA.  Instead it’s a long (over four minutes) and graphic dramatization of what happens when a teenage girl decides to text message while driving.

We know that people respond much better to stories than they do to statistics. This particular story revolves around a group of happy-go-lucky teenage girls unaware that their actions are about to destroy many lives. Between the blood, disturbing images of screaming passengers, and a possibly dead baby, there’s enough to make anyone squeamish.  Since the PSA is too graphic for the US censors, you won’t be seeing anything like it on our TV screens (even YouTube insists viewers verify their age before viewing the video), but you have to wonder how effective it would be.

Personally the PSA doesn’t seem all that shocking. Perhaps I’m desensitized to violence on TV or maybe it’s no different than the totaled car parked in front of my high school before the prom —a good-in-theory, bad execution kind of thing.  Both the totaled car and this PSA seem too hypothetical and cheesy. According to a recent poll, however, I might be alone— the majority of Americans feel the PSA is both effective and necessary viewing for US audiences.

See it for yourself here (remember, it’s 18 and over only!).

A while back, the Obama administration asked people to submit video PSAs about Swine Flu. The finalists have been chosen. Now it’s up to the rest of us to pick the winner. You can vote one time for (or against) each video every day—until Sept. 16. The winner gets $2,500 and boundless fame. My own personal favorite is the one pictured here.

For an excellent primer on what we are likely to experience this fall, check out David Brown’s Washington Post piece—on the 1957 flu, in all its eerie familiarity. Then, as in now, we were dealing with a new strain of influenza that was highly infectious but not highly fatal. Then, like now, there was a scramble to invent a vaccine—and it came too late for the peak of the season, which may happen this fall, as well. In both cases, the flu targeted young people—unlike normal seasonal flu.

Spoiler alert: At the end, the story tells us what we all want to know. How many people died? The usual caveats apply—we have much better antibiotics and antiviral drugs to mitigate against the flu today, and the vaccine is likely to be much more effective—once it finally comes out. But this still helps give us some idea of the scale we may be dealing with. Not Armaggedon, but not a normal flu season, either.

“In all, the 1957-58 pandemic was responsible for about 60,000 ‘excess deaths’ in the United States—deaths above what would have been expected in normal times. About 40,000 occurred in the summer and fall of 1957, and 20,000 in the winter of 1958. The toll is the equivalent of 107,000 people in the U.S. population today. On average, ordinary, or seasonal, influenza contributes to the deaths of about 36,000 people in the United States each year.”

I’ve always thought that the ability to talk on the phone while driving was part of the cabbie job description.  But until this New York Times article I had no idea it was actually illegal for NYC cabbies to talk on the phone while driving (the same cannot be same said for Washington, DC and many other cities).

While the law is largely unenforced, the dangers of cell phone use while driving are undeniable (drivers using cell phones are “four times as likely to cause a crash.”) But drivers aren’t the same thing as taxi drivers, right? Surely cabbies must be better equipped to deal with distraction. If anything, they simply drive more than the average person.  A 2004 study concluded that NYC cabbies were less crash prone than the average driver (crash rate was one-third lower than other vehicles), and as a result, fewer passengers are injured in taxis.

It’s hard to know how cell phone use affects the crash rate. According to the New York Times, the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission doesn’t keep records of any taxi accidents (with or without cellphone use). In April, in an effort to improve passenger experience, the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission considered installing cell -phone blocking technology in cabs, but idea was met with serious concerns over how such technology would interfere with emergency calls.

You could always ask your taxi driver to refrain from cell phone use, but it is a little scary to make unpopular demands of someone who holds your life in their hands… Anyone ever tried? Let us know!

This year, Americans will experience some 1,200 tornadoes and 8,000 wildfires. A handful of storms will probably turn into honest-to-God hurricanes. Disasters are getting more common and more expensive, largely because we keep moving more of our valuables into the country’s most beautiful, unstable places.

Watching over this all-night, boom-bust casino is Craig Fugate, the new head of FEMA under President Barack Obama. Check out my story in the new Atlantic about why Fugate, a former firefighter, is an unusual choice for the job.

My prediction is that Fugate’s personality will be an asset on some days—and a handicap on the Hill on other days. The little known secret about FEMA is that it doesn’t actually do anything; it just leverages partnerships with other organizations. As head of this giant co-op, Fugate will likely command the respect of many of FEMA’s partners. But he will also have to kowtow to Congress to get the resources he needs.

Watching a single woman-in-red denounce President Barack Obama as a noncitizen is not particularly scary. We can imagine any number of complicated life narratives for this woman’s shotgun rage. We may even muster compassion. The more alarming question is, Why are all those other people cheering her on?

Just did a story for The Daily Beast on the latest conspiracy theory in a summer ripe with paranoia. Before the gentleman who warned the government to get its hands off of his Medicare, there was the resurgence of the moon-landing “hoax” and rampant speculation about the real purpose of Swine Flu.

Are conspiracy theories getting worse? The limited research that has been done suggests….well, yes, maybe. Two of the major forces that propel conspiracy theories into popularity both happen to be on the rise at the moment.

The first is what psychologists call anomie—a sense of alienation and anxiety about the future. In 1992, a Rutgers University sociologist named Ted Geortzel decided to try to measure the belief in conspiracy theories among a sample of Americans. He surveyed 348 southern New Jersey residents—a racially diverse group that represented the region overall—to find out what they thought of 10 different conspiracy theories.

The results were a little frightening. Most of the participants believed several of the conspiracies. And people who believed in one theory were likely to believe in others. Some 41% thought it was at least partially true that the Air Force is hiding evidence that the United States has been visited by flying saucers. And 42% said it is partly or definitely true that the FBI was involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

In this and other such studies, minorities were significantly more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. But plenty of white people raised their hands, too. In general, people who believe that the average person’s situation is getting worse, that it is unfair to bring a child into the world today, and that most public officials are uninterested in the average man seem to be more likely to also believe outlandish but sinister explanations for major historical events.

Anomie may be more prevalent in times of high unemployment and widespread uncertainty—times like right now, in other words. People feel a generalized sense of malaise and distrust. To relieve that discomfort, it may help to assign blame to an evil mastermind. Which evil mastermind depends on what patterns your brain has previously held to be true.

For some people, the most sensible evil doer will be a liberal, dark-skinned president with foreign relatives and a tendency to see America as something less than perfect. For others, the obvious dark lord would be the opposite—a conservative, pink-skinned vice president with a tendency to see America as perfect. Psychologists have a name for this tendency, albeit a lame one: “confirmation bias.” We pay more attention to theories that support our pre-existing conditions.

Which leads to the second force behind modern conspiracy theories. The Internet (you knew this was coming) makes it effortless to find detailed confirming evidence to support our biases. In his 2009 book, Going to Extremes, legal scholar Cass Sunstein detailed the tendency of like-minded people to become more extreme—after they spend time talking amongst themselves. He should know, now more than ever.

Over the course of a lifetime, about 1 in 4 Americans will buy their own health insurance. Why? Because things happen, as is painfully clear right now. Maybe you get laid off. Or your company stops offering insurance. Or maybe you start your own business. The American way, right?

My friend Sarah Wildman is a freelance writer (like most reporters these days, including myself), so she had to buy insurance herself. For those of you who think the private market gets health care right, check out her story on Slate’s Double XX. 

She and her husband researched the plans, found one that promised comprehensive maternity coverage (for which they paid extra, since they were hoping to have a baby at some point). They paid $500 a month for coverage. Then Sarah got pregnant and delivered a healthy baby. That’s when she found out that “maternity coverage” did not cover labor, delivery or her hospital stay.

Apparently most voters don’t want to lose their current health insurance, so they are not supporting reform. Stories like this remind us that we are clinging to a capsizing ship. Bye, bye life boat!