On a recent trip to Wall Drug in South Dakota, I saw something quite ingenious: a bathroom door you open with your forearm. Of course! Brilliant! In this flu-conscious era, perhaps it's best that you don't grab the handle in a public lav before you go back to the dining room and pick up a burger with your germy mitts.

The antibacterial soap, the hot-air driers -- it's not enough. With H1N1 back for an extended engagement, we'd be happy if the door frame released a hot hissing shower of Purell followed by UV lamps that burned off the six top layers of epidermis. Even then we'd use gloves and tongs to pick up the burger. Flu is afoot.

Worse: Flu times two. You have your basic seasonal variant, which is probably pouting like a high schooler because pig plague is getting all the attention. We have vaccines for basic flu, but H1N1 has trotted back before its vaccine has arrived. So let us review the salient points.

• If you are sick, stay home. This is a nice way of saying that misery may love company, but the company does not love misery, and maybe dragging yourself into the office when you are, in effect, an open fire hydrant of viral cooties is not a good idea.

• Please continue to include pigs as an important part of a balanced breakfast. The pork industry is unhappy about the media's use of the term "swine flu" and wants us to call it H1N1. Understood. But it's not going to happen. H1N1 may be technically accurate, but it looks like a text message from a drunk. Even if we called it H1N1, the damage is done. There are people who think you can get it from pigs. This is odd, for several reasons. If you are stupid enough to think you can get it from eating pork, there's a good chance you don't know that swine and pigs are the same thing.

If you do know this, then you actually believe you can get a respiratory disease from cooked bacon. This is like thinking you can get food poisoning from chicken flatulence. Besides, haven't we all been trained to cook pork completely, lest trichinosis grip our innards six hours later? Does anyone ask the waitress for pork tartare with a side of cow brains? Food safety experts have been drilling us about this for years, and I'm so brainwashed by the PR campaign, I hosed down the family room with bleach when my daughter watched a cartoon version of "Charlotte's Web" while I microwaved some sausage.

Perhaps people think you can be swine-struck if you come in contact with the beasts -- technically, they have a point, which may explain why the swine barn at the State Fair had fewer people some days than a Lindsay Lohan film festival, but even so, people should have been reassured by all the hale 4-H kids in the building. If the kids had been heaped in a corner, shuddering under blankets, issuing pitiful oinks, that would have been one thing. But here are people who spend their days with swine, and they exuded rude, cheery Farm Health. Why?

They washed their hands. You're more likely to get fungoo at the fair from someone sneezing into the open air because he has both hands full of food and can't bring himself to stifle his eruption with a turkey leg.

We all get this now. Cover your mouth and wash your hands. If people don't get this, and they're still worried about eating pork, they are swaddled in a Snuggie of Ignorance so impenetrable that they think the Spanish flu can be contracted by listening to flamenco music.

In short: Don't panic. Get your shots. Stay home if you're sick. Count yourself lucky that this isn't the bird flu pandemic they've been predicting, or that no one's using the words "inevitable zombie infestation" or that googling "Dakotas mass grave" doesn't come up with a page about how to apply for a forklift driver in the newly opened Bismarck Pit. We'll make it. If you're still scared of pork, wait until you get bird flu and someone offers you chicken soup. Chances are you'll take it.

More daily at www.startribune.com/buzz • jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858