Get a health insurance quote – While officials in the U.S. have stopped short of writing the obituary for the H1N1 swine flu, the damage caused by outbreak has, thankfully, fallen well short of a major epidemic on the scale of the 1918 flu pandemic.

One of the major reasons is that the swine flu virus is less contagious than pandemic flu bugs of the past, according to a study from the New England Journal of Medicine. And American researchers found that the H1N1 strain proves fatal for 1 in 2,000 people who get it, a far cry from the 1918 pandemic, which killed 50 of every 2,000.

The consensus among experts is that we’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re getting close.

Across the Atlantic, the swine flu epidemic has abated. The World Health Organization has announced that the H1N1 swine flu appears to have peaked in Western Europe, prompting nations with excess stock of the vaccine to plan a global fire sale.

Originally anticipating that the vaccine would require two doses, French authorities purchased 94 million vaccinations for a population of just over 60 million citizens. Only five million people in France have received the vaccine since October, leaving a massive surplus.

Germany, the Netherlands and Britain also plan to sell excess vaccines. Qatar has already purchased 300,000 doses, and Egypt plans to buy two million.