"PANDEMIC!!"

I'm beginning to have my doubts about the "inevitable H5N1 bird flu pandemic" that scientists have been telling us about for the last 3-4 years.
Pandemic is a scary term! Who can survive a pandemic? Well, I guess I have survived two of them without even knowing about it.
I came across an article about avian flu in today's Washington Post. A couple of paragraphs particularly caught my attention:
The federal government is hard at work trying to ready the country for a global outbreak of a new, highly transmissible strain of influenza -- a pandemic. Such events occur at unpredictable intervals. There were three in the last century, in 1918-19, 1957 and 1968.
The H5N1 strain of avian influenza, or bird flu, has killed millions of birds and 164 people, mostly in Asia, since 2003. It does not pass from person to person efficiently. But it is highly lethal and still evolving; many experts believe it has the potential to cause a pandemic.
I wasn't around for the 1918 pandemic but I appear to have lived through the 1957 and 1968 pandemics pretty much unscathed. I have no memory of a major flu outbreak, much less a pandemic, in 1957 or 1968. In fact, if there had been a deadly and highly transmissible virus going around in 1968, they would still be picking up dead bodies with flowers in their hair in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.
So, you tell me: Are healthy Americans who don't go around picking up dead birds really in danger? Or is this another media exploitation?