What's the Big Deal About Toyota's Cars?

I need someone to explain this to me:  There have been something like a few thousand reports of sudden unintended acceleration on all of the ~30 million Toyota vehicles sold since 1999.  That's something like 0.00667%.  Let's be generous and say there are 10x as many problems as reported.  That's still 0.06667%.  That is, there are about 70 incidents for 100,000 vehicles, with a much lower rate of injury and even lower rate of death.

Why are we wasting our time on this but not bothering to deal with real problems?  What are we doing to fix human-induced climate change?  What are we doing to fix problems with access to clean water?  What are we doing to fix the 40,000 gun-related murders in the US every year?  What are we doing to deliver better, cheaper health care to our citizens?  What are we doing about Darfur?  What are we doing about the five million people injured or killed due to alcohol-related vehicular accidents?

In short, why is everyone freaking out about such an irrelevant "problem" when there are real problems to deal with?