Wagging the dog?

I ran across an article this morning on Drudge in which the World Health Organization confirmed more the 15,000 H1N1 deaths. Does that number seem really low for all the hoopla we have heard? It did to me, but the article didn't say if that was for 2009, 2010, or overall since the "pandemic" started. According to the CDC, there were more than 11,000 deaths in the U.S. alone in 2009, which makes me wonder whether the Drudge article is missing a zero or two. That would make more sense. We have a lot of people in these United States, but we're only a fraction of the world-wide population.

For a wider perspective, I did a little digging and discovered that more than 37,000 people died in alcohol-related car crashes in 2008 in the U.S. alone. I didn't dig deeper for global statistics. Just a little something the consider when watching or reading the news.