Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

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Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith-Rogers.

Today, the flu.

We find ourselves in the middle of a highly contagious flu season, and today

Andy Pecosh, a Johns Hopkins biologist, returns to the podcast to talk to Stephanie Desmond

about the rapid increase in influenza, why new mutations are leading to the worst season in decades,

and how there's still time to protect yourself. Let's listen. Andy Pecosh, thanks so much for joining me.

Always a pleasure to be here.

So let's talk flu.

We've done this before, but it's a new season.

And what are we seeing out there?

Yeah, and you know, there's a running joke in the flu community

that every season is a new flu season

because it seems like there's always a little bit of

uniqueness to every flu season. This year, you know, we're seeing flu around the U.S. in particular,

around the time we expect to see it. We always see upticks around Thanksgiving. They start to

increase significantly in the winter holidays. But what's novel about this year's flu is how

quickly it is spreading once it gets to an area. So I look at some of these flu maps and I see

states that are basically have no flu activity one week, two weeks later, they're in epidemic stages.

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