SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
We know winter as flu season, but now, before winter begins, is the right time to think about that terrible virus, not months from now. NPR health correspondent Rob Stein explains why.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: The annual flu season usually starts sometime in October or November, but this year, it looks like the flu started to pick up about a month early.
CAITLIN RIVERS: There are enough signs pointing in the same direction to make me think, OK, yes, this is the start of flu season.
STEIN: Caitlin Rivers is an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University. She says the percentage of people testing positive for the flu has been on the rise since the beginning of September. The number of people showing up in emergency rooms because of the flu has also been inching up for weeks now.
RIVERS: What's unusual is that it's very early. It's definitely coming quite a bit earlier than we've seen in a typical year.
STEIN: She says the timing of the flu season isn't the only thing that's odd. Flu activity seems to have started increasing this year in the West, in states like California, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska.
RIVERS: And it's also uncommon to see new waves of respiratory virus start in the West. It typically starts in the South and then expands from there. So two uncommon developments there.
STEIN: Rivers stresses that flu activity is still low in most of the country, but that's changing now too. It's unclear why flu got such a surprisingly early start in the West, but one clue might be a new flu variant virologists recently spotted. This variant evolved a mutation that appears to make it better at evading our immune systems. Dr. Alex Greninger heads infectious disease diagnostics at the University of Washington in Seattle, where doctors are seeing as much flu right now as they usually would around Christmas. And they're seeing lots of the mutated variant.
ALEX GRENINGER: That's our best argument for what's going on right now in terms of this early flu season.
STEIN: So Greninger, Rivers and others are urging people to think about getting their flu shot sooner rather than later.
GRENINGER: If you haven't gotten a flu vaccine, you should go get it now because we've got this strain spreading right now.
STEIN: The vaccine should still provide good protection, and older people have a new option - the first flu shot that uses mRNA technology. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn't been promoting flu shots as it usually does. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's in charge of the CDC, is no fan of vaccines. Dr. Demetre Daskalakis quit as one of the CDC's top flu experts last year because of Kennedy.
DEMETRE DASKALAKIS: It's frankly disappointing that CDC is quiet, given that flu kills hundreds of kids a year and can result in tens of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of deaths.
STEIN: The CDC declined to make someone available for an interview for this story. In a statement to NPR, a CDC spokesperson says the agency is developing a communication strategy for flu vaccination that will include information about the benefits and risks of getting a shot. Rob Stein, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF J. COLE SONG, "FORBIDDEN FRUIT") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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