The 2018­-2019 flu season is here, and Kaiser Permanente is once again urging its employees and members to get vaccinated. While the effectiveness of the flu vaccine varies from year to year, the message from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has remained the same: to prevent flu, the best thing you can do is get a flu shot every year.

Flu vaccine is especially important for people at higher risk of developing severe flu, including pregnant women, young children, health-care workers, the elderly, and people with chronic conditions, such as diabetes, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. A new CDC-led study, published on October 11 in Clinical Infectious Diseases, found that for pregnant women in particular, getting a flu shot reduced their risk of being hospitalized for flu-related reasons by an average of 40%.

The study was a partnership among CDC and other public health agencies and health-care systems in Australia, Canada, Israel, and the United States. Allison Naleway, PhD, an epidemiologist and vaccine researcher at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, is a study coauthor.

“Expecting mothers face a number of risks to their health and the health of their baby during pregnancy, and getting the flu is one of them,” Naleway explained. “This study’s findings underscore the fact that there is a simple, yet impactful way to reduce the possibility of complications from flu during pregnancy: get a flu shot.”

Naleway is a site principal investigator for the Vaccine Safety Datalink, a national project funded by the CDC that links automated medical records data from several integrated health-care delivery organizations to monitor vaccine safety.