It's not so much that more than a whopping 100 cases of measles have cropped up in California since December. It's not even that concerns over the number of unvaccinated kids have been escalating in recent years. The reason measles is on the tip of so many people's tongues these days, and the subject of so much sturm and drang in the media, is this: It's a mild case of mass hysteria. The reality, doctors contend, is that chances of the potentially deadly disease once again becoming epidemic are nil. The virus was declared wiped out in the U.S. in 2000, and with more than 90 percent of the country still getting vaccinated, overall safety is still strong. The current measles outbreak began in December, when the illness cropped up at two Disneyland theme parks in Southern California. Within a month, smatterings of viral infections had spread throughout the state with a handful of cases showing up in other states. To date, California has reported nearly double the 61 measles cases reported all of last year. That's ... considerably fewer than the tens of thousands of cases that were diagnosed across the nation in 1989 in another outbreak. But try telling that to parents of little kids who have become alarmed at ceaseless news reports of increasing cases. Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says one or two people in 1,000 with measles worldwide will die from the illness. That's less deadly than ... tetanus, which globally kills up to 20 percent of its victims.