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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Swine Flu Fact and Fiction

You can’t spell "pandemic" without "panic," and news about swine flu has put people in a tizzy. As with any tizzy, this has resulted in some misinformation getting mixed in with the real-time updates. We present a few misconceptions about swine flu that we’ve seen or heard in the last few days.
1. You can get swine flu from eating pork.
No more than you can get avian flu from eating birds, human flu from eating humans,

How Serious Is Swine Flu?

Blogs, news organizations and Twitter are all exploding with rumor and fact about the swine flu outbreak. But at the National Academy of Sciences today, President Obama said there was no need to panic:

Obama: We are closely monitoring the emerging cases of swine flu in the United States. And this is obviously a cause for concern and requires a heightened state of alert.  But it’s not a cause for alarm.

So what’s the real terror alert level on swine flu?