Cold weather has dumped snow, freezing rain and ice across the U.S., from the Southwest to the Mid-Atlantic to the Northeast. Does that mean this week will be filled with more sniffles, colds and flu cases across the country?
Despite the popular perception that serious temperature drops make you sick, one expert who sees a lot of patients with flu says science doesn’t support such a link.
“It’s really inconclusive,” Dr. Leonardo Huertas, chairman of the emergency department at Glen Cove Hospital in N.Y., told CBS News.
A popular idea is that cold weather diverts energy away from the immune system to warm up the body, but Huertas says the scientific evidence doesn’t support this idea.
What cold weather does is it tends to make people more likely to stay indoors, Huertas explained. More people inside may mean more disease-causing microbes inside, which in turn may raise risk for a person to get sick.
“Cold and flu viruses tend to do better in lower humidity,” he said. Survival rates are higher for the viruses thriving in low humidity, and one Feb. 2013 study found increasing humidity levels indoors may reduce flu transmission, according to LiveScience.
But even that theory has some limitations. A March study found that while flu is more common in temperate areas where the humidity drops, the disease peaks in tropical areas like the Philippines and Vietnam when its hot and rainy, NPR reported.
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