National Geographic Every year, flu season in North America starts to peak around the holiday season. But this year, doctors and researchers are especially worried.
“We will have a significant flu season this year, and we have a lot of concern that it’s going to be more severe than typical,” says Richard Martinello, an infectious diseases specialist and chief medical officer at Yale Medicine.
Why? The version of the virus that’s circulating around the globe has undergone significant genetic changes that make it easier to infect people, and therefore to spread between them. It means “our antibodies won’t see it as well,” says Danuta Skowronski, a physician-epidemiologist and flu researcher at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, who first flagged the mutations in the Journal of the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada in October. What’s worse, these genetic changes happened too late to account for in flu shot formulations.