Eh, they said that with SARS and bird flu. SARS was something to get scared about since we didn't have anything to protect against it. At least we've got some treatments for it based on existing H1N1 vaccine stockpiles.
The only functional mitigating treatment we have is antivirals... and those aren't widely available in most of the world. If this thing actually does switch to a lethal person-to-person transmittable strain capable of operating in colder climates, this is a pandemic virus with the potential to decimate the Third World and wreak havoc even in countries with advanced health care systems.
In point of fact, this IS the avian influenza scare - a recombinant flu virus with avian components, incubated in pigs, that successfully jumps to humans. The whole reason why avian influenza is a worry in the medical community is because of the recombinant properties of influenza as a viral family - it can create novel forms for which we have no natural immunity or medical counter with relative ease. Anti-virals are of limited effectiveness because they are targeted generically at the viral immune response rather than at a particular virus.
SARS did not kill normal healthy adults. Influenza does, and a novel strain of influenza is just as capable of wiping out a third of the human population on Earth now as it was back in 1918.
