{"id":11046,"date":"2025-12-17T12:24:33","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T18:24:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=11046"},"modified":"2025-12-17T12:24:36","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T18:24:36","slug":"experts-predict-this-years-flu-season-to-be-worse-than-usual-heres-why-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2025\/12\/17\/experts-predict-this-years-flu-season-to-be-worse-than-usual-heres-why-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Experts predict this year&#8217;s flu season to be worse than usual\u2014here&#8217;s why"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"panel body-content\"><div class=\"panel__container\">\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalgeographic.com\/health\/article\/flu-virus-season-subclade-k-variant\">National Geographic<\/a> Every year, flu season in North America starts to peak around the holiday season. But this year, doctors and researchers are especially worried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe will have a significant flu season this year, and we have a lot of concern that it&#8217;s going to be more severe than typical,\u201d says&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/medicine.yale.edu\/profile\/richard-martinello\/\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\"Richard Martinello, opens in a new window\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Richard Martinello<\/a>, an infectious diseases specialist and chief medical officer at Yale Medicine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why? The version of the virus that\u2019s circulating around the globe has undergone significant genetic changes that make it easier to infect people, and therefore to spread between them. It means \u201cour antibodies won\u2019t see it as well,\u201d says&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bccdc.ca\/our-research\/people\/danuta-skowronski\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\"Danuta Skowronski, opens in a new window\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Danuta Skowronski<\/a>, a physician-epidemiologist and flu researcher at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, who&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/utppublishing.com\/doi\/10.3138\/jammi-2025-0025\" target=\"_blank\" aria-label=\"first flagged the mutations, opens in a new window\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">first flagged the mutations<\/a>&nbsp;in the&nbsp;<em>Journal of the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada in October<\/em>. What\u2019s worse, these genetic changes happened too late to account for in flu shot formulations.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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. \u201cWe will have a significant flu season this year, and we have a lot of concern that it&#8217;s going to be more severe than typical,\u201d says&nbsp;Richard Martinello, an infectious diseases [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-influenza"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11047,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11046\/revisions\/11047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}