ONE of the weirdest bits of advice in the face of the threat from Sars is that which tells us there's no need to panic - yet.

Will somebody please inform me as to just when there is a need to panic? In what set of circumstances would it ever be useful to panic? Plenty of people in my neck of the woods are panicking, whipped into a constant state of anxiety by the news coverage concerning Sars all over the papers and on every TV news bulletin. Are the media trying to get us to panic, or what?

But what are the facts? Sure, Sars is a nasty disease, we don't know what causes it and we don't know how to cure it. But the reality is that 95 per cent of the people who catch the disease make a full recovery. Of course, it's sad that anyone dies from it, but what I'm trying to urge is a sense of proportion. I would think far more people die of flu than are likely to perish through Sars. The figure for flu deaths is about 250,000 every year worldwide. What we don't seem to be able to do is make intelligent risk assessments. One of the most dangerous acts you are ever likely to perform is to climb into a motor car and drive out on the open road. Latest figures show that nearly 4,000 people die on the roads in Britain every year: that means you have about a one-in-a-hundred chance of dying in a car crash.

Nobody I've ever met is deterred by this frightening statistic. The fact is we decide that the convenience of travelling by car more than compensates for the risk involved. Another, related, mystery surrounds the comparison of road deaths with railway deaths. Four thousand people killed on the roads each year is a huge number. In a bad year, perhaps 30 might be killed on trains - in most years only six or seven. Yet rail safety is such an obsession in the mass media.

And now we're seeing some of the most sensational, panic-stricken headlines ever on the subject of Sars. The other day: 'Sars panic will cause financial turmoil'. But I thought they'd just told us there's no need to panic! Of course there will be financial turmoil - if we allow ourselves to be talked into it. I thought Iain Duncan Smith was a fairly level-headed, unexcitable sort of chap, but here he goes saying that the Government ought to classify Sars alongside cholera and smallpox and forcibly quarantine suspected sufferers. He even went so far as to say that the police should be given powers to arrest people with the illness.

Is it really worth causing such commotion and universal panic in an attempt to curtail a disease which has a fatality rate of five per cent? Political leaders and newspaper editors given to whipping up this frenzy should first consider the likely results of their provocation: economic catastrophe worldwide, nobody travelling anywhere, collapse of the airline industry, destruction of world trade, food and materials shortages and so on. And all for what? For an admittedly nasty little bug - but we're hardly talking about bubonic plague or an old-style smallpox epidemic.

Our problem is our desire for a sensation, for shock-horror. The war is over and life resumes its customary dullness. So the bright sparks in the media say: "I know, let's have a plague scare!" For goodness sake, grow up!

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.