An analysis of 12 years of data collected from over 500 hospitals in 25 different states shows that weather, geographic location, and urban or rural location all appear to influence hospitalizations for waterborne infectious diseases, according to a study published August 7, 2024 in the journal , by Victoria Lynch and Jeffrey Shaman from Columbia University. Waterborne infectious diseases caused by bacteria, parasites, and viruses still affect over 7,000,000 people annually in the United States. Lynch and Shaman analyzed potential links between weather and hospitalizations for waterborne infectious diseases, specifically looking at whether these associations were influenced by drinking water source, location (rural/urban), and region.
The authors looked at hospitalizations caused by 12 specific water-borne pathogens, including bacteria like Escherichia coli, parasites like Cryptosporidium, biofilm-forming bacteria such as Pseudomonas and the pathogen causing Legionnaires' disease—distinct from other bacterial pathogens because they naturally inhabit environmental water—and Norovirus. They used data from 516 hospitals in 25 states collected over 2000–2011 as part of the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP), along with weather and soil data from the NASA/ NOAA North American Land Data Assimilation System 2 (NLDAS-2) dataset. There were 57,335 hospitalizations for waterborne disease between 2000 and 2011 from 516 hospitals.