Sunlight and Protection Against Influenza

David Slusky and Richard Zeckhauser

Economics & Human Biology, 2021, vol. 40, issue C

Abstract: Recent medical literature suggests that vitamin D supplementation protects against acute respiratory tract infection. Humans exposed to sunlight produce vitamin D directly. This paper investigates how differences in sunlight, as measured over several years across states and during the same calendar week, affect influenza incidence. We find that sunlight strongly protects against getting influenza. This relationship is driven almost entirely by the severe H1N1 epidemic in fall 2009. A 10% increase in relative sunlight decreases the influenza index in September or October by 1.1 points on a 10-point scale. A second, complementary study employs a separate data set to study flu incidence in counties in New York State. The results are strongly in accord.

Keywords: Seasonal Influenza; Sunlight; Vitamin D; Natural Experiment; H1N1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I10 I12 I18 N32 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X20302124
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Sunlight and Protection Against Influenza (2020)
Working Paper: Sunlight and Protection Against Influenza (2018)
Working Paper: Sunlight and Protection Against Influenza (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:40:y:2021:i:c:s1570677x20302124

DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2020.100942

Access Statistics for this article

Economics & Human Biology is currently edited by J. Komlos, Inas R Kelly and Joerg Baten

More articles in Economics & Human Biology from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().