personally I am not a fan of the stuff for the ordinary person. Good hygiene and common sense should be and is the best defence. There is a societal change to be germ phobic, we have anti-bacterial solutions for everything and over time the natural resistance we as humans have built up is slowly but surely dropping.
More often than not the families which are healthy and dont suffer from chronic health problems generally regard anti-bacterial substances as garbage and tend to stick with soap and water for everything. Most of these cleansers have been dreamt up not as a public safety product but as a product to make money, they are marketed to pick on the weak emotive triggers - family, health, children, germs, environment. Do these triggers suck you in?

As for the bird flu, it circulates every 20 years or so. It has been around for a very long time and it will be around again in the future.
A little research and a little common sense can easily cut through any journalistic scaremongering.