With fall comes the autumn leaves, football season and flu season.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the exact timing and duration of flu season varies, but flu activity ramps up in October, picks between December and February and can last as late as May.

University of Kentucky immunologist Ms.. Audi stopped by our studio earlier today to give us some advice on how to best protect ourselves.

More in tonight's look at medical news.

What are your expectations this flu season?

Well, I'm actually a little bit reassured by the numbers because our flu activity this year is a little bit better than it was last year or the year before, which is great.

But our vaccines have already rolled out.

They were available about two weeks ago.

So I think, you know, let's just get vaccinated and get ready.

But based on the current numbers, it's looking like not a very scary season ahead of us.

Well, good.

So we'll keep our fingers crossed.

It's still early because we are literally recording the first cases as we speak.

But this is our typical season, October to March.

Because I do remember this time last year we were telling a much different story about that.

So what explains the change?

Well, I would say that we've been out of our COVID protocols for a while last year and even a little bit of tail the year before, people were just, you know, letting their guards down, getting out of masking as a regular basis, going back to school, going back to in-person activities.

And so we you know, as you know, with flu, it's a seasonal vaccine.

And so we only have immunity for whatever is circulating that year.

And most times it's our best guess for what's going to be circulating that year.

And so I think the the the harder seasons that we've had were really related to the fact that we had just come out of hiding or hibernation.

The code, the COVID induced hibernation that we've all had, and more people mingling for the first time in months and people really being happy to return to in-person classes and have Thanksgiving dinner and and all the things that they missed out on for a couple of years.

So I think that that's that and the and the waning immunity from not being exposed to flu, from not gathering with others where the two driving.

Forces and you would highly recommend that folks don't gamble.

Right.

That they get their flu vaccine unless some health condition would cause you not to.

And would there be a reason why someone is ineligible for a flu vaccine?

Yeah.

So there's there's a couple of reasons not to be eligible to flu vaccine.

And one of them is egg allergies, because we still grow our flu vaccines and eggs.

We're at we're still looking for new technology.

But really, other than that, we should we should all be getting vaccinated doing we should not take a gamble because flu is still one of the main causes for sending young children, especially those under the age of one and older people so older than 60 years of age and pregnant women to the intensive care unit every year.

So if you had a recent flu vaccine and you felt a little off kilter a few hours later or the next day, should you be concerned about that?

I'd say that's your immune system getting to work there, seeing the antigen and all those pieces are getting activated and happy and making all those antibodies and your other immune cells are making cytokines and just just preparing themselves to respond.

So you're building your immune memory.

So I would not be concerned about that.

And it's a fully inactivated vaccine, so you cannot get the flu from getting the flu vaccine.

Right.

That was my next step.

Right.

It's not a live.

It's not a live virus.

It's not even live attenuated.

It's it's a it's a dead vaccine.