Just one day before the release of the new Backstreet Boys album, “This Is Us,” band member Brian Littrell was diagnosed with H1N1, in a brilliant if completely unintentional publicity move. The rest of the Backstreet Boys, Nick Carter, Howie Dorough and A.J. MacLean, along with their touring crew, were prescribed Tamiflu as a preventative measure. The band and their touring crew had just returned from Tokyo when Littrell was diagnosed with the flu. The Backstreet Boys were forced to cancel their appearance at Hard Rock Cafe's Pinktober event in New York on Monday and the performance scheduled for Tuesday on CBS' early show.

"We were really looking forward to spending time with our closest fans and friends in NYC," Littrell said in a statement following the cancellation of Monday's performance, which was supposed to raise money for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, "I hope we can come back soon and do everything we can to help." Fans of the now thirty-something boy band can rest assured that neither the fizzling of the boy band fad of the late 1990s nor H1N1 can keep the Backstreet Boys down; they will soon be back, again.