Harmful algal blooms (HABs) have been found to cause increases in healthcare visits for a variety of illnesses to humans if exposure and contact is sufficient. We use a more comprehensive dataset than previously implemented in prior literature to better isolate visits by healthcare facility type and proximity to bloom. Using a difference-in-differences model, our results suggest HABs cause an increase of 23.67 healthcare admissions per zip code per month across four HAB-related diagnoses. This impact is a 3,000% increase over baseline non-bloom times and an increase in monthly healthcare costs of about $250,000 for the entire impacted area. Our data include inpatient non-emergency and outpatient healthcare visits, which account for over 60% of all HAB-related healthcare visits, meaning that prior literature that has not measured those facilities has greatly underestimated HAB health impacts.

人们发现，如果暴露和接触足够多，有害藻华 (HAB) 会导致人类因各种疾病就诊的次数增加。我们使用比之前文献中实现的更全面的数据集，以更好地根据医疗机构类型和开花时间距离来隔离访问。使用双重差分模型，我们的结果表明，在四种与 HAB 相关的诊断中，HAB 导致每个邮政编码每月的医疗就诊人数增加了 23.67 人。这一影响比基线非开花时间增加了 3,000%，并且整个受影响地区的每月医疗费用增加了约 250,000 美元。我们的数据包括住院非紧急和门诊医疗就诊，占所有 HAB 相关医疗就诊的 60% 以上，这意味着之前未测量这些设施的文献大大低估了 HAB 健康影响。