ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Global environmental drivers of influenza.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 159 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
159 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- A meta-analysis result: Uneven influences of season, geo-spatial scale and latitude on relationship between meteorological factors and the COVID-19 transmission.Environmental research · 2022Pooled it
- Influenza-associated disease burden in mainland China: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Scientific reports · 2021Pooled it
- Temporal Association Among Influenza-Like Illness, Cardiovascular Events, and Vaccine Dose in Patients With High-Risk Cardiovascular Disease: Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Clinical Trial.JAMA network open · 2023Trial
- Effects of Heat-KilledNutrients · 2021Trial
- Resurgence of large-scale influenza A (H1N1) outbreaks: Modeling the interplay of transmission, loss of immunity, and vaccination.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2027Article
- Sensitivity of Convergent Cross Mapping to temporal discontinuities: A case study of seasonal influenza in Hong Kong.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2026Article
- Advances in causal discovery methods for ecological time series.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- The limitations of non-mechanistic methods for characterizing pathogen-pathogen interactions: A simulation study.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Global disparities in COVID-19 vaccine coverage associated with trajectories of SARS-CoV-2 adaptation.BMC infectious diseases · 2026Article
- Environmental drivers of influenza A and B: causal analysis and forecasting.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Unified climate factors predict influenza outbreak seasonality across tropical and temperate regions.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Noisy periodicity in tropical respiratory disease dynamics.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Quantifying the effects of response diversity dynamics on ecosystem stability.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Biological traits predict species' time-varying responses to multiple global change drivers.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Microbiome assembly statistics toward ecosystem-scale insights, forecasting, and management.The ISME journal · 2026Review
- Article
- Epidemiology and lagged climatic drivers of pediatric viral lower respiratory tract infections in Tianjin, China (2023-2025).Frontiers in cellular and infection microbiology · 2026Article
- Nonlinear and potential driving impacts of meteorological and air pollution factors on influenza-like illness in Jinan, China.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Association between short-term exposure to ambient ozone concentration and influenza incidence in Kawasaki City, Japan: a time-stratified case-crossover analysis.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Epidemiological trends of laboratory-confirmed influenza cases driven by meteorological factors in Anhui Province, China: a multi-city time-series analysis.BMC public health · 2025Article
99 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In temperate countries, influenza outbreaks are well correlated to seasonal changes in temperature and absolute humidity. However, tropical countries have much weaker annual climate cycles, and outbreaks show less seasonality and are more difficult to explain with environmental correlations. Here, we use convergent cross mapping, a robust test for causality that does not require correlation, to test alternative hypotheses about the global environmental drivers of influenza outbreaks from country-level epidemic time series. By moving beyond correlation, we show that despite the apparent differences in outbreak patterns between temperate and tropical countries, absolute humidity and, to a lesser extent, temperature drive influenza outbreaks globally. We also find a hypothesized U-shaped relationship between absolute humidity and influenza that is predicted by theory and experiment, but hitherto has not been documented at the population level. The balance between positive and negative effects of absolute humidity appears to be mediated by temperature, and the analysis reveals a key threshold around 75 °F. The results indicate a unified explanation for environmental drivers of influenza that applies globally.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.