Is this really a pandemic?

Flu of any description is very unpleasant as I know from personal experience. certainly the last time I had it I didn't really care whether I recovered or not for about 3 days - which is bad. I can't help feeling the dangers of the swine flu are somewhat exaggerated just as they were with SARS and bird flu. Having lived through a smallpox epidemic - not that I remember much about it except queueing until late in the evening for the vaccination; as well as two serious flu epidemics and the Cuban missile crisis I'm not sure I'm going to lose any sleep over it.

Are a few cases in most of the major countries the criteria for a pandemic? As a percentage of world population the numbers seem trivial at present. Just looked it up in Wikipedia which quotes the World Health Organisation. It has to be a new disease and one that causes serious illness and spreads easily amongst humans. www.wikipedia.com So now we know.