Public health officials have been plenty worried about the avian flu and its potential to morph into a strain easily transmitted by humans, a scenario many experts predict could cause a global pandemic.

But so far, the public is not so worried. Even the mainstream news media, often accused of overplaying potential threats, has taken a relatively modest approach to covering the flu. Matthew C. Nisbet, an assistant professor of communications at The Ohio State University, dug up some insightful stats on all this.

While The New York Times did 550 articles on the SARS outbreak during a 3-month period back in 2003, it has done a grand total of 267 articles on the avian flu since January 2003, Nisbet reports. For those same periods, the network newscasts of ABC and NBC combined featured 149 SARS reports and 100 flu segments.

The flu just can’t compete with other big news that is actually happening or is under the rearview microscope. In the first three months of 2006, the Times published 81 articles about avian flu, 1,000 articles about Iraq, and 220 on Hurricane Katrina (which, if you’ll recall, happened last year).

Nisbet also cites polls showing that public concern/interest in the avian flu issue has not matched the attention once given to SARS and lags far behind attention paid to Katrina and rising gas prices.

Nisbet concludes: “Though experts are often quick to criticize the media, so far, there is little evidence that news coverage of Avian flu has promoted undue alarm among the American public.”

That criticism will come after the pandemic, if one occurs, when all those not killed by the virus will stare at CNN for hours and complain about the ’round-the-clock coverage.