A storyline which sees the web-slinging superhero fighting the master-criminal who has in his employ a group of scientists who are able, at the crime-lords beckoning, to cook up the recipe for any known disease or virus, (as well as a few new ones), and in doing so create a pandemic on a global scale.

But is it really a pandemic?

relatively few people worldwide, can pick up the label 'pandemic'.

As of the 30th April 2003 there were 5663 reported cases of SARS worldwide, with 372 deaths.

Of these, 1589 cases were in Hong Kong, and 3460 in China.

316 of the dead are from these areas.

This means that there are only 614 confirmed cases in countries outside of these two, and 'only' 56 deaths.

To further get these figures into perspective, consider that the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated deaths from smoking to be 3.5 million a year in 1997, with an estimated 2000 people dieing in China each day from smoking related diseases.

Allergic reactions to common medicines cause more deaths then SARS ever exhibited throughout its outbreak.
Anaphylactic reactions to penicillin cause 400 deaths annually among Americans, and aspirin, although in many other ways a wonder drug, causes 500 deaths a year in the US in children under 6 through overdosing.

So are we getting carried away with the hype surrounding the H5N1 virus?

Adrian Gibbs, a scientist on the team that was behind the development of the primary H5N1 treatment 'Tamiflu', says in a report he is submitting today that swine flu might have been created using eggs to grow viruses and make new vaccines, and could have been accidently leaked to the general public.

"It might be some sort of simple error that's not being recognized," Gibbs said on ABC's "Good Morning America."

In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Gibbs admitted there are other ways to explain swine flu's origin.

"One of the simplest explanations is that it's a laboratory escape, but there are lots of others," he said.

Getting back to the movie plot, imagine if you will, an unscrupulous crime lord who creates his ill-gotten gains from futures trading on the stock markets. During a period of economic downturn it would be fair to assume any means of gaining the inside track on a stock's ability to make huge gains would surely attract the attentions of the crime-boss.

All thats required is for a vial of a specially created virus to be broken in an area of dense population and nature would take care of the rest.