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I think it's actually pretty incredible how efficient the WHO is at dealing with this type of thing. Of course they have to scare the shit out of everybody, but that has actually helped make people be careful.
SARS didn't turn out to be the global killer it could have, but maybe, just maybe the WHO letting the world know how it could have been led to people taking precautions and stopped it from spreading. That stuff doesn't work as well in Africa where people are too poor to really care and education is very difficult to achieve. But in the developed world, the "media scare" is often a good thing, and the WHO does stop more of this stuff than they get credit for.
In hindsight, we look at Y2K as a ridiculously overhyped phenomena in the tech world that didn't manifest itself much at all. But if people (and more importantly corporations and governments) hadn't freaked out and spent millions of dollars preventing it, then maybe it would have been as bad as the dire predictions.
Paranoid beats oblivious if you have to choose.
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