I? sitting here sipping my third ?well, maybe my fifth ?cup of coffee and feeling guilty for damage I? inflicting on my health this morning. As I do every morning.

But wait. Here? this article in the Los Angeles Times that says the latest study shows ?surprise! ?coffee is not harmful. In fact, it is beneficial to health. ?t is a good beverage choice,?a Harvard researcher says right here.

Hey! Remember all those supposed experts who gravely warned us that coffee drinking will cause heart disease? All those scholarly studies from august institutions that concluded that coffee will cause cancer and hypertension and maybe global warming, too?

Well, in the words of the late, great Emily Litella: Never mind.

I guess I should feel relieved and pleased by the new coffee-friendly study. Instead, I? exasperated and saddened. Saddened for the all guilt I felt, needlessly as it turned out, during all those years of what I thought was wanton coffee drinking. Exasperated for all the stupid studies and panics du jour that have wasted our time through the ages.

Just think about some of them. So-called experts warned us in the 1960s that, thanks to the population bomb, we? be standing on each others?shoulders by the year 2000. In the 1970s, they told us we? be completely out of oil soon and that global cooling was an existential threat.

By the mid-1990s, we knew those scares were bogus, but by then we had a real threat to wring our hands about: At midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, the Y2K bug was going to cause airplanes to fall out of the sky and water systems to stop working. A worldwide Armageddon-style panic would begin for sure.

And think of all those other coffeelike diet and health threats that turned out to be overblown. SARS and Legionnaire? Disease and avian flus. I don? know anyone who got any of that stuff. I don? know anyone who knows anyone who got that stuff. But I suspect a few died of boredom trying to keep up with it all.

Often these health threats and environmental disasters unfold over years. For that reason, the swine flu scare was at least refreshing. It sprung up only a month ago, quickly panicked the world, and then just as quickly everyone seemed to say, in that little-old-lady voice, ?ever mind.?

Many people worry that all of these scares ?this pandemic of panics ?will create the ?ry wolf?syndrome. You know, we?l start ignoring them and then a truly lethal threat will sneak in. But it? hard to see how that? a problem; as time goes on, we seem more obsessed by overblown scares, not less. I mean, exactly who? ignoring them?

I worry about something else. It? the hurt these things are putting on our economy. In the swine flu scare, L.A. cruise ships were diverted and travel to Mexico generally seized up (although the drug cartel war did a pretty good job of killing Mexican tourism, too). The vice president got on national TV and said no siree, he? not letting his family get on any airplane. Not exactly the reassuring words the travel industry hoped to hear in the midst of an overhyped panic.

Just think of the workplace disruptions. All those hundreds of schools closed for days or weeks every time some kid got the sniffles caused parents to miss work, cancel appointments and delay projects. Those kinds of things add up; Hong Kong severely chopped its expectations for GDP growth based partly on the effects of swine flu.

Please do the economy a favor. Next time there? some well-hyped scare ?and there will be one, and probably soon ?just take a breath. Try to recall the transcendent wisdom of Emily Litella. And go ahead, have another cup of coffee.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].