Really, novelist Anne Lamott loves her kid. But here's what she says about the little light of her life in a recent essay in Salon.com, the San Francisco-based online magazine:

"The viral cloud of autumn has descended and Sam is back in school, which means he is a portable petri dish of filth and pestilence." In a single month, the little boy gave his devoted mom first, a bad head cold and then the flu. "I'm sick as a dog," the San Rafael, Calif. mom complains.

It's that time of year when kids' noses run yellow and green, unsavory hacking noises fill the office and waste cans everywhere overflow with soiled Kleenex.

Yes, we've mapped the human genome. No, we still haven't cured the common cold.

According to the federal health officials who track such things, Americans will catch 44 million colds and come down with 73 million cases of the flu between now and March. Kids, those carriers of contagion, will account for nearly one in two of the colds, and one in three of the flu cases. Women will get more than their fair share of what's left.

Females in their prime child-rearing years -- 18 to 44 -- get sick at a rate of 24 colds per 100 women per year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The rate is 16 colds per 100 men in the same age bracket.

For flu, the rate is 41 cases per 100 women per year -- and 36 cases per 100 men. After age 45, when one's children are less likely to swap germs with sick friends, the male-female ratio evens out. All told, adults in the United States miss 20 million work days a year due to colds and more than three times that many -- 70 million days -- with the flu. Kids miss 41 million school days for colds, 74 million for flu.

The bugs can be more than a nuisance. Just one bout of the flu costs the typical person $320 in symptom-relief remedies, doctor bills and lost wages, according to health economists at the North Carolina's Research Triangle Institute. Each year, about 130,000 people are hospitalized with the flu. And 20,000 die of flu complications.

Carol Olson, a working mom in Palo Alto, Calif., was out of commission for a week last time she had the flu. She caught the bug from kids Elyssa, 11, and John, 8, who brought it home from school in the spring of 1997.

"It was the kind of flu where all you want to do is die," Olson remembers. A self-employed consultant at the time, she didn't have to worry about exhausting her sick leave. She didn't have any. But she was forced to put clients on hold and work twice as hard to catch up after she recovered.

"It was really bad," she says. "I was trying to keep my kids going, my husband going, my clients happy."

Not long afterward, Olson went to work for Aviron, a Mountain View, Calif. biotech company, as senior vice president of commercial development. One of her jobs: To help bring to market the first nasal spray flu vaccine.

(c) 2000, Claudia Morain. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate