The GLS procedures have been applied to the prediction of the influenza rate using readily available functional variables. These kinds of models are extremely useful to health managers in allocating resources in advance for an epidemic outbreak. The estimation of the dependence allows that simpler models can achieve good results maintaining nice interpretations of the model. In particular, the simple model (b) that only uses the easy-to-measure variate Tempn,s(t), shows that influenza may increase due to a cold wave with daily temperatures around 7°C for two weeks which is consistent with much of the literature on influenza. Also, the models show that the estimated temporal dependence of the influenza virus is strong and stable over time.