The onset of flu season each year comes as no surprise. But what is surprising is that we don’t know exactly how the flu spreads. Jeffrey Shaman is working on that. An associate professor in environmental health sciences, he and his team study infectious diseases, and they have been rolling out annual forecasts of the influenza season for the past several years. Now they’re starting a field study of people around Manhattan to find out what makes some people express flu symptoms and others not—and perhaps to figure out how it spreads.
Shaman talks about his research in this latest of videos about what we do at the Earth Institute. Check out the whole series on State of the Planet. You can watch an innovative video of Shaman explaining the influence of climate on health on Stat, a site covering news of health, medicine and biotech.
