"The 1957 and 1968 pandemics claimed about 100,000 total combined."
Shortly after this bird flu scare became noteworthy, I went to Books A Million and got several on the last bad pandemic, which was in 1918, I think. The books were very enlightening about viruses in general, how they work, how they mutate, how vaccines work, and so on. I would recommend doing this, because it is quite interesting, and very scary. Definitely worth anyone's time.
1918 may as well be 1818, the way the world has changed since the last big pandemic.
As scary as the natural mutations are, I'm much more inclined to think that the real danger comes from work being done to "medicinize" existing bugs. The effort to turn AIDS virus into an AIDS killer comes to mind.
While on the subject of flu, remember the time in 2004 when John Kerry saved us from George Bush's engineered flu outbreak with a terse round of criticism and self-righteous indignation? That was awesome. Children, the elederly, minorities and the working poor all saved by the people's candidate.