As Prescribed: Despite the heat, flu season is upon us

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) - It's officially now fall, and that means flu season is upon us.

It might be hard to imagine being curled up with a pile of tissues and painkillers with the lingering summer sun and heat hanging on. But September's warmth is actually kickstarting the flu season, Dr. George Rutherford, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF, told KCBS Radio's Bret Burkhart on this week's episode of "As Prescribed."

"Now everybody's inside because of the air conditioning. So it's almost the reverse of everybody's inside for the heat in the wintertime," he said. "Plus, school's back in session. Respiratory viruses are more easily transmitted in closed settings, like closed rooms... when you're in a closed environment and people are pretty close to each other, you can have person to person transmission pretty easily."

The single best way to prevent the flu is to get vaccinated each fall before the season begins in October. As a matter of convenience, Dr. Rutherford also suggests getting vaccinated for COVID-19 at the same time you receive a flu shot.

"If you're over six months of age, the current national recommendation is that you should be vaccinated against the two diseases annually," he said.

While the timing of a COVID shot isn't important, you can get it at any point in the season, when you get a flu shot matters .

"For influenza, you'd like to get the vaccine about six weeks before you're going to be exposed," said Dr. Rutherford. "So now we start guessing when the peak of influenza transmission is going to take place. Typically, in the last few years, it's been right around the first of the year. So if you back that out, then you're looking November, late October, something like that."

If you plan on traveling or being in conditions where the flu virus can spread more easily, you might want to consider getting vaccinated even earlier.

"So it's a kind of timing issue, but be that as it may, and all things being equal, I think what you want to be doing is getting vaccinated as soon as possible within the bounds of convenience," said Dr. Rutherford.

If you haven't been vaccinated yet or only recently received a shot and don't have enough time for the vaccine to "kick in," your chances of getting sick may be higher but you shouldn't worry.

"It's about secondary prevention rather than primary prevention," Dr. Rutherford said. "We have good drugs for influenza and we have good drugs for COVID."

"[But] there has to be a mindset of if I develop respiratory symptoms, and if I develop severe enough respiratory symptoms, I should seek medical attention and go get diagnosed with a flu or COVID or something else, and then get treated for flu or COVID if you have one of those," he added.

Listen to this week's "As Prescribed" to learn more. You can also listen to last week's episode to hear how treatment for muscular dystrophy has evolved and is continuing to advance, here .

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“As Prescribed” is sponsored by UCSF.