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Seasonal flu is now a pandemic that lasts for years and years because you've got so many people that it's jumping back between northern and southern hemispheres and moving itself around the world. By the time it gets back to where it started, it's changed sufficiently so that people are no longer immune.

There we times when everybody in the house has the flu. You're cleaning up vomit and it's 2 in the morning, and you're wishing there was somebody else there to help you.

We had a week off in the middle of shooting, but as soon as everyone stopped, we all went down with six different types of flu and other unmentionable diseases.

Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. In the developing world, the data is much sketchier, but the death toll is almost certainly higher.

The flu is very unpredictable when it begins and in how it takes off.

The best thing about getting a flu shot is that you never again need to wash your hands. That's how I see it.

The reality is: By the time swine flu got on the radar screen of global public health, it had already spread. It was already in the States, it was in Mexico, it was in New Zealand. By the time it reaches that point, you've lost the ability to contain it.

When I have supped too heavily of an evening, I drink in the morning a large number of cups of coffee, and that as hot as I can drink it, so that the sweat breaks out on me, and if by so doing I can't restore my body, a whole apothecary's shop couldn't do much, and that is the only thing I have done for years when I have felt a fever.

From a population point of view, it's actually very important that as few people as possible get the flu. People getting the flu is not a private matter. The risk for healthy people is really about your friends and neighbors and fellow travelers.

A fever is an expression of inner rage.