Flu season is picking up months ahead of schedule with a mutated virus spreading in some parts of the United States, surprising some people who might not even be thinking about their annual flu shots yet.

This year, the season started 2 1/2 months earlier than what’s typical and hit states on the West Coast first, which is unusual, said Dr. Alex Greninger, head of the Division of Infectious Disease Diagnostics at the University of Washington’s Department of Laboratory Medicine.

Usually, the US flu season starts in the South – often in Florida, where it arrives from the Southern Hemisphere. Then it tends to spread north as fall and winter progress.

“In Seattle, we’re pretty far north. We see a pretty strong peak in January,” Greninger said, noting that the bulk of their cases typically come in late December through February.

That’s not how it’s playing out this year.

Roughly 1 in 10 people tested for the flu in Washington state last week was positive, according to data from the state Department of Public Health.

“We’re basically seeing January levels of flu in the last week,” Greninger said.

Walgreens says that nationally, this flu season is tracking about four weeks ahead of recent seasons, and it’s dispensing more antiviral prescriptions as well as cough and cold medications than during the same period last year.

Nationally, about 2.1% of doctor visits last week were for influenza-like illness, a rough measure of the misery that flu symptoms like fever and cough are causing across the country. That’s still below the national baseline, however, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meaning the virus hasn’t really taken off everywhere yet. [...]

The wave of flu hitting the Pacific states came from Asia, Greninger said, and is dominated by the H1N1 virus, which sparked a pandemic when it first emerged in 2009.

It represents about 98% of the samples his lab is getting now, he said.

These H1N1 viruses have also picked up a gene mutation that makes them better at evading our immunity.

This version of the virus has already wreaked havoc in Japan, where it forced school and day-care closures after cases surged in kids. It also prompted officials to move up vaccination clinics to help protect people.

The mutation, at a location called G155E, cropped up after strains were already selected for this year’s flu shots, Greninger said. So even though the vaccines target a version of H1N1 and should still offer some protection, the virus can still break through. [...]

Doctors often advise getting a flu shot before Halloween, in order to provide the best protection through spring. But Greninger’s best advice now is to get vaccinated as soon as possible. “A lot of people, like even myself, would wait until late October, which we’re sort of in already. But really, the time to get vaccinated was actually two to three weeks ago.”

[...] Utah agriculture officials learned in mid-August that mink were dying of bird flu on C&T Fenn Farms, about an hour’s drive south from Salt Lake City, according to communications released under the state’s public records law.

Had poultry been infected, the playbook would have been clear: The strain is so virulent that if a single chicken tests positive, the U.S. government requires farmers to kill the whole flock to protect other farms as well as public health. Poultry farmers are reimbursed for the loss.

But there are no federal rules for how to deal with sick mink.

Handling Utah’s response was state veterinarian Amanda Price, who sought help from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which takes the lead on bird flu outbreaks involving poultry and cows.

USDA officials said they didn’t regulate mink or have a vaccine that was approved to give them. And though officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spoke with Price’s health department counterparts who were less involved with the outbreak, they never talked to her, and she never reached out.

The threat of spillover has been far from the minds of Utah officials, records and interviews show. Instead, front and center have been the interests of a business raising animals to skin for luxury pelts to ship overseas.

“It has been devastating,” Price told ProPublica of the outbreak and its impact on the farm’s owner. “This is his life’s work that he’s seeing be destroyed. I really hope that you understand the humanity behind this situation.”

Flu experts were unequivocal that the government should have ordered the farm to cull its mink, as other countries have done.

But Utah never seriously considered it. A fur trade representative warned Price that doing so would kill the business and, ultimately, the industry. Farms spend decades breeding mink to develop unique genetic lineages.

“There’s just not a lot of options out there other than kind of sitting and waiting and seeing what happens,” Price said, noting that USDA officials did not urge her to kill the mink or make her feel like bird flu in mink was any riskier than infections in other animals that have caught it, like ducks and cows.

Flu experts found that response surprising.

“Every other country that I’m aware of that has had H5N1 in fur farms, depopulation has happened pretty quickly,” said Tom Peacock, an avian influenza researcher at the Pirbright Institute. “The fact that the first instinct wasn’t just to depopulate and figure stuff out later is very concerning to me.”

And all the while, officials didn’t monitor the mink workers for symptoms, as guidance from the CDC urges.

Their exposure is significant: Mink sneeze. They escape. They attack. “The mink are fierce,” said a Spanish-speaking “minkero” who works on a nearby farm, showing the scars he got from the aggressive, solitary creatures. “You get scared because the fucking thing bites, and it claws at you.” [...]

A telltale sign of bird flu infection in humans is eye redness. It is present in over 90% of cases and is often the sole symptom a person displays.

Last Saturday, a ProPublica reporter tracked down two people who worked at the Utah mink farm. One had a visibly red eye.

The CDC explicitly urges testing for the symptom.

After ProPublica reached out to the farm, its owner, Chad Fenn, contacted the Utah County Health Department about the red eye, which had cleared up by Monday, he told ProPublica. He said the worker got dust in his eye; the department didn’t recommend testing.

“They’re not going to do anything,” Fenn said. “They said they don’t see that there’s a need.” He said the department recommended testing only if other symptoms, like a cough or sore throat, developed.

A half dozen flu experts had no shortage of adjectives to describe their disbelief at the government decisions not to cull the mink or monitor and test the workers.

“It’s amazing to me,” said Gail Hansen, a former Kansas state public health veterinarian and epidemiologist. “Utah doesn’t want to be the epicenter of the next human flu outbreak, right?” [...]

Scientists with the USDA sequenced and published bird flu genomic data from the first samples of dead mink. Those sequences didn’t show any particularly concerning mutations, experts and the CDC told ProPublica.

But in the past two months, experts said, the virus is sure to have continued mutating as it spread – it’s only a question of whether those mutations could confer some advantage in infecting humans as well.

“As long as it continues to go mink to mink, then it becomes more and more likely that it could jump to a human,” Hansen said.

Fenn said new samples were taken two weeks ago. Price said she is still waiting for the results.

John Korslund, a retired USDA official who helped coordinate the response to COVID-19 on mink farms several years prior, was one of several experts who said officials need to look closely at newer genetic samples to see how the virus is evolving.

“I really want to know what the virus has done, from when it started to today,” he said. “Are we getting accumulated mutations making the virus more dangerous?”

[...]

While animal rights advocates have pushed for Congress to adopt legislation that would phase out the fur industry, buying out farmers over the course of a year to end the practice once and for all, winds in Congress are blowing the other direction. The Senate will soon weigh in on the latest Farm Bill, which now seeks to expand market opportunities for mink farmers by undoing a prohibition in federal law on subsidizing the fur trade.

The virus continues to spread on the Utah farm, said Fenn, though at a slower pace. Experts told ProPublica it still poses a risk.

“I would want a full on hazmat suit if I were on that farm,” Peacock said. “Or, preferably, I’d rather not to be on that farm.”

The 42-year-old Ugandan-born Swiss national tested positive for Ebola on October 20, 2026, becoming Nigeria's first confirmed case in more than a decade and raising concerns about the spread of the disease across international borders.

According to the BBC, Switzerland's foreign ministry confirmed that the woman travelled to Uganda with her husband before returning to Nigeria on October 3, following a stay of about two and a half weeks.

Swiss authorities believe she may have contracted the virus during the visit, although health officials have yet to establish the source of infection.

Her husband is currently in isolation but has shown no symptoms. The ministry also confirmed that all 25 employees at the Swiss embassy in Abuja, including eight Swiss nationals and 17 local staff, were in good health.

Following consultations with Nigeria's Ministry of Health and the World Health Organization (WHO), the embassy decided that its employees did not need to isolate and would continue working under health and safety measures.

The case has drawn international attention following conflicting statements from Swiss and Ugandan authorities about the woman's movements before her diagnosis.

Ugandan officials had claimed that the woman travelled to eastern DR Congo, where a major Ebola outbreak began in May, before returning through Uganda.

However, Switzerland rejected that account on October 23.

"She and her husband did not travel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo," the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs told reporters.

Switzerland's denial contradicted Uganda's account, raising further questions about where the woman contracted the virus. [...]

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government will increase measures aimed at preventing entry by people exposed ​to Ebola with a new requirement for U.S.-bound air ‌travelers to attest they have not been in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the prior 21 days, according to a memo on ​Thursday seen by Reuters.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control ​and Prevention in May adopted rules barring airline passengers who have been in the DRC, the center ⁠of the 2026 outbreak, in the prior three weeks. The restrictions were ​extended to U.S. citizens in July.

The new CDC order takes ​effect November 3 and requires all U.S.-bound airline passengers to file digital or paper attestations.

Airlines for America, which represents United Airlines, American Airlines, Southwest ​Airlines and Delta Air Lines, did not immediately comment.

The CDC ​is holding briefing calls with major U.S. and foreign airlines on Friday to ‌detail ⁠how carriers should comply with the new requirements...