Swine Flu to be bigger than the Bubonic Plague?

Fear of the Swine Flue has gripped the world, ever since news of this virus killing over a hundred in Mexico was published. The Swine Flu Virus seems to have travelled to all corners of the globe extremely quickly, even affecting people in Australia and New Zealand just a few days after the initial outbreak was reported. What is this virus?
However the big question is - how bad will the Swine Flu be? The last massive pandemic to affect the world was the Spanish Flu back in 1918. The Spanish Flu killed over 50 Million people between 1918 and 1920 and affected up to one billion people, half of the world's population at the time. With the world's population now well over 6 billion, what will the effects of the Swine Flu be?
In this time of modern technology, do we have the skills and know how to defeat this, to date rampant virus? Surely we will not reach the terrible consequences of the Spanish Flu or even worse the Bubonic Plague of centuries ago. However, right now everyone is talking about the virus. Anyone with flu like symptoms have been asked to immediately go and get a blood test to check for Swine Flu.
There have been 2 other outbreaks of Swine Flu in the last 40 years; one was in the U.S. in 1976 and the other was in the Philippines in 2007. However, these were no where near as bad as this outbreak of the Swine flu which seems to have orginated from Mexico and is reaching pandemic proportions scarily quickly.