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The great thing about my iPhone - at least when it's functioning - is its uncanny ability to elicit gasps from passersby, usually as the svelte silver casing slips yet again from my sweaty palm to land with a disconcerting clunk on the floor. Not unlike a precocious child dropped repeatedly on its head, this has retarded the phone's ability to satisfy even my outrageously pedestrian needs.

I simply need to make phone calls. I don't use my cell phone to send out "tweets" every time something ravishing, like a perfectly boiled egg, catches my eye. I do not use this contrivance to work out, through GPS, my latitude and longitude coordinates to three decimal places so my mother can zero in on Google Maps to warn me about a growing bald patch. "No ma, that's that the Sahara. I'm a bit further east, in Hong Kong." A simple street address will suffice for most occasions.

But my dying iPhone can access a mind-boggling array of applications like "The Moron Test", and "Amateur Surgeon". It also offers a remarkable "Swine Flu Tracker" and the "H1N1 Update". These pick up news feeds and "tweets" from the CDC (Centres for Disease Control, www.cdc.gov/travel) so that in the comfort of your bedroom, surrounded by loved ones, a large furry dog, and a riveting episode of "Inspector Morse", you can instead proceed to the scare the bejeezus out of yourself and everyone else.

Then there are the Google flu alerts. The search giant keeps watch on query clusters - and spikes in activity - about any related subject to gauge interest, panic, and possible outbreaks. But does a caterwaul of flu searches in a particular location mean that city is a) experiencing an outbreak, or b) simply paranoid? Is the complete absence of online search in Mongolia indicative of a) no flu, b) no electricity, or c) supreme sangfroid? And can this service track outbreaks of adult site searches so that the oppressed - and rudely distracted masses - can finally head off to check out some really cool stuff and give the inflatable doll a rest? We don't really know.

Among other things, the CDC lists travel notices relating to H1N1 in the USA, yellow fever in Brazil, pertussis (whooping cough) in Australia, cholera in Zimbabwe, meningococcal diseases in India and Africa, chikungunya fever in much of Asia, rabies in Indonesia, H5N1 avian flu, Marburg in Uganda and even "melamine" in China. What do you do if there is an outbreak of melamine? I must confess I have never seriously thought about this. You could don rubber gloves, catch the stuff and toss it all into a large dishwasher. Or you could mix it in your food, as happens in China, to produce an astronomically high protein reading.

The World Health Organisation, WHO, (www.WHO.int/en) estimates that seasonal influenza kills almost 250,000 to 500,000 people a year, not a trifling number. Malaria claims a million lives each year. Then look at percentages. Marburg, like Ebola and Lassa, is a haemorrhagic fever caused by a vile filovirus that turns the insides to mush till you simply melt and ooze out of your orifices. The Ebola kill rate can go as high as 90 per cent. Compared with this sort of jaw-dropping hit-by-a-truck statistic, swine flu is a toddler on a unicycle. But toddlers learn, and grow, and acquire more, and ever faster, wheels.

Yet, the known antecedents of swine flu stretch back to Thanksgiving 2006 when a Wisconsin teenager slaughtering pigs picked up the H1N1 swine flu combined with an avian strain. Yes, this one has been around and is not so new after all.

Raking up memories of Sars when six million people nearly perished breathing in their own frightful garlic breath for the first time behind green masks, Hong Kong's Metropark hotel in Wanchai was sealed off and placed under strict quarantine for a week in May. Bored guests in masks and full surgical garb ate dull government stodge and wandered about listlessly while bargirls, inadvertently snared in the police dragnet, added a sense of colour and commerce to the otherwise humdrum drama.

It is heartening then to see that on May 25, Google Zeitgeist (www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist/index.html), which whimsically lists the most popular searches as a finger on the pulse of our less-than-literate planet had, in its Top 10 for USA, duvin, girls gone wild video, kung fu hustle, and even North Korea. Paris Hilton is, of course, a regular. Flu didn't figure at all. Thank you America. It is a Great Nation that picks Paris over Pestilence every time. Let's stay focused on the essentials.

Vijay Verghese edits Smart Travel Asia, a Hong Kongbased travel website. The writer may be reached at www.SmartTravelAsia.com.