The results of our statistical modeling suggest that respondents' deployment of protective behavior is mediated by their subjective anxiety level, controlling for demographic, epidemiological, and geographic variables. There is good and bad news in this result. The literature on risk perception and public health shows that there is generally a very weak correlation between people's anxiety over a particular risk and the probability of death or disability arising from that risk [11, 12] . Overall, it is unclear whether anxiety over perceived risk will lead to efficacious protective behaviors [10] . This said, by far the most common protective behavior reported in our survey was increased hand-washing, which has been shown to be effective at removing Influenza A(H1N1) virus from subjects' hands [23] and is promoted by CDC and other health organizations as an effective infection control intervention [19] .