With the flu your muscles ache and you have a fever.
With strep throat you have a fever but no muscle aches.
With a cold you don’t have fever or muscle aches.
With any or all of these you may also have a stuffy or runny nose, a sore throat, a headache or sinus ache, and a great need to lie down and sleep. You may also wish you were dead.
Of the three, the flu is the only one that actually could make you dead – in the US about 20,000 people die from the flu each year (some years are even higher). When I was about 7, the father of a friend of mine died from the flu. He was 32 years old.
Antibiotics only work on the strep throat.