{"id":390279,"date":"2010-03-04T16:53:53","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T21:53:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.wsj.com\/economics\/2010\/03\/04\/joblessness-may-help-explain-quiet-flu-season\/"},"modified":"2010-03-04T16:53:53","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T21:53:53","slug":"joblessness-may-help-explain-quiet-flu-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/390279","title":{"rendered":"Joblessness May Help Explain Quiet Flu Season"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scientists are puzzled why new H1N1 swine flu cases dwindled this winter<\/a>, with regular seasonal flu hardly appearing at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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Fewer jobs mean less flu. (Associated Press)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Perhaps the economy has something to do with it \u0096 with unemployment high, fewer people are sniffling around the water cooler. In fact, research<\/a> from Emory University<\/strong> economists Sara Markowitz<\/strong>, Erik Nesson<\/strong> and Joshua Robinson<\/strong> finds that changes in the labor market significantly affects the spread of the flu.<\/p>\n

With data from the Centers for Disease Control<\/strong> and the Labor Department<\/strong>\u0092s household survey of employment, the economists used regional differences in flu cases and employment rates to calculate how increased hiring can lead to a rise in the number of people in bed with the flu. Then they crosschecked their results with a similar calculation using Google Flu Trends, which uses flu-related web searches as a measure of the number of flu cases by state. Their finding: For every 100,000 new employees, there are 2,246 new flu cases during flu season.<\/p>\n

The economists didn\u0092t apply their results to what\u0092s happening now, but we can: Nearly 3.9 million fewer people working in January than a year earlier translates into about 87,000 fewer flu cases. Nothing to sneeze at.<\/p>\n

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Scientists are puzzled why new H1N1 swine flu cases dwindled this winter, with regular seasonal flu hardly appearing at all. Fewer jobs mean less flu. (Associated Press) Perhaps the economy has something to do with it \u0096 with unemployment high, fewer people are sniffling around the water cooler. In fact, research from Emory University economists […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":850,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-390279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/850"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}