It’s flu season, as anyone can tell by driving by their neighborhood pharmacy and seeing the signs for “flu shots” all day, every day.

People don’t seem too worried about the flu this year. In fact, the 2011-2012 season has gotten off to a slow start, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

No states have reported widespread illness to the CDC, although the number reporting sporadic activity increased slightly last week from 28 to 30.

There is a corresponding lull in media coverage about the flu this year.

It’s been two years since the last pandemic scare over H1N1, commonly known as the swine flu. You might recall that an outbreak in Mexico triggered a panic, causing schools to close and public assemblies to be canceled. People rushed to get vaccinated. The media recycled the old stories from the 1918 outbreak that killed 50 million people.

H1N1 did spread globally and was officially declared a pandemic by the CDC and the World Health Organization. The illness killed 18,000, but the number of cases started tapering off in November 2009. It never was as deadly a variation as many people thought.

In truth, health officials have always been more worried about the H5N1 avian flu, which has been plaguing parts of Asia and the Middle East over the last 10 years. Fortunately, though, the virus can’t be passed easily from human-to-human, although it’s happened in rare cases. Instead, it’s spread more commonly to people who handle chickens and other fowl.

The theory has been that if H5N1 developed mutations allowing airborne transmission, it would also become less lethal. In its present form, it kills about 60 percent of those infected.

The biggest story of the 2011-2012 flu season may be that researchers have proven that theory to be wrong.

An article published Friday in Scientific American says an international ruckus is being raised after scientists created a laboratory version of the H5N1 that can easily be transmitted through the air without losing its virulence. It involved a combination of five mutations.

They used ferrets to test the virus since they react to the flu in a similar way to humans. They found that the virus was passed from animal-to-animal from their own cages. “A significant portion of the infected subjects died,” the magazine reported.

The researchers, from the University of Wisconsin and the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, have had trouble publishing their findings.

First, there’s the worry that biological terrorists could get their hands on the information and unleash an epidemic.

There’s also the issue that nature has been unable to accomplish this on its own during the last decade, and our top scientists have given it a helping hand. The virus now exists where it did not before, and maybe I’ve watched too many movies but accidents do happen. Things can go wrong and a secure lab may not be as secure as everyone thought.

Proponents say creating the new virus gives researchers an opportunity to study it and minimize its impact before it appears naturally.

But in my imagination, I see Michael Crichton and Ken Follett picking up a pair of scissors and carefully snipping out the magazine article, to be placed prominently in their ideas file.

We can only hope that fiction doesn’t one day become reality.

Photo: H5N1 or Avian influenza virus (Wikimedia Commons)

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