Separate the facts from flu fiction

A News & Events entry posted on October 18, 2011

"The flu can kill healthy children," says Richard Kanowitz of Scarsdale, N.Y., who founded Families Fighting Flu in Amanda’s memory. "The only way to prevent it is to get vaccinated."

Experts talk about some of the most common myths:

Myth 1: The flu is just a bad cold.

A cold is an annoyance. The flu kills up to 49,000 people a year and hospitalizes 200,000, the CDC says. Last year, 114 children died. Flu symptoms tend to appear suddenly, unlike a cold. People who get H1N1 (swine flu) are often laid up for a week with fever, body aches, sore throat, fatigue, headaches and a runny or congested nose, says the CDC.

Read the entire article: USA Today