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Cross-species illness are not at all uncommon. I'm not sure where you're getting that. Bacteria and virus, like all other life on earth (though much faster), mutate and adapt. Lots of our illnesses came from living in close proximity to animals (small pox, the black plague, for instance) that originally had some version of it. Avian flu, swine flu, etc... any animal infected will have millions of bacteria/viruses and some will be mutated. Every once in a while one of these mutations will give it an advantage in attacking human cells and then it'll reproduce and millions and millions of them will be in that person and eventually one of those will mutate and be better at infecting OTHER humans and then.....
Jared Diamond in his book "Guns, Germs and Steel" actually posits that one of the reasons the West gained as much dominance in the world that it did was because of us living so close to animals, getting the illnesses, and then gaining immunity (so we could then spread epidemics of small pox everywhere we went.)
I agree most the coverage has been ridiculous and I'm not terribly concerned (though a pandemic is ALWAYS possible, we shouldn't imagine it couldn't happen to us) but if I'm going to be around sick people all the time I'll get a vaccine. I got the flu a couple years ago for the first time in almost a decade and it was so god awful I never want to deal with that again.
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