Talk:Vitamin D and respiratory tract infections

Reducing inflammation?
I don't see how an immunosuppressing effect (reducing inflammation) logically leads to a reduction in viral infection. Saying in the lead that "Vitamin D can be seen as a precursor to natural body steroids, so it generally reduces inflammation. Thus, it can help to prevent flu infections" is a very dubious assertion. Tim Vickers (talk) 15:51, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
 * This is only a comment, but respiratory inflammation from a viral infection can worsen the symptoms. See cytokine storm. --IO Device (talk) 01:39, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Name change?
This page seems to overlap between Vitamin D influenza links and Vitamin D–URTIs in general. In fact, if Vit D plays a role in fighting bacteria and viruses generally, it sounds more like "Vitamin D and the immune system". Any suggestions for a better name?

See WP:NAME for guidelines on good names for articles. Boud (talk) 20:45, 2 November 2009 (UTC)


 * To be sure, the line between the diagnosis of influenza or respiratory tract infection is often elusive. --Dyuku (talk) 07:05, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Title in lead
Our MoS requires that the title be used in the lead and be in bold, but I'm not sure how to do it in this case. Can someone do it? -- Brangifer (talk) 06:15, 4 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Done! --Dyuku (talk) 15:39, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Something fishy - unique(?) open-access abstract finds no link
Could i please suggest that the people working on this page learn that open access is not just a luxury for the wikipedia, open access publishing is also a standard that the sort of people who edit wikipedia pages ought to take as a minimal moral standard for research publishing. In some domains such as particle physics and cosmology, pre-publishing on http://arXiv.org, which is fully open access, has become the norm. Peer-review references are added once (if) the article is accepted by a journal - pre-published articles on arxiv.org that are older than a year or so and don't have a peer-reviewed journal reference generally get taken less seriously. Articles that are not on arXiv.org at all generally get taken less seriously, since many less people read them, either in the short term or the long term. This is an example of Green OA.

Since people here apparently have access to "subscription access" journals, probably you should spread the word about efforts such as the Public Library of Science in the USA for disciplines like medical research, where public pressure by citizens with moral values is needed to open up access, or various EU type directives (thanks to citizen pressure) that are trying to pressure journals to at least move to delayed open access if they're unwilling to go to Gold OA.

If you still have trouble understanding this, try imagining that the Wikipedia was an open access encyclopedia only to free software programmers, and that everybody else had to pay-per-view and pay-per-edit. Would it be as successful as it is presently? The quality of research benefits from open access.

In the shorter term, for working on this wikipedia article, there are at least open-access abstracts available for many medical journals - try 'nih gov' in a google search and you should find them.

Anyway, what's fishy about the present version of this article is that what seems to me to be the only open access abstract - i can't see any open access articles - is the Li-Ng M, Aloia JF, Pollack S, et al. 2009 article, which has a negative result - no link between Vit D and URTIs is found. The text of the wikipedia article seems to use some of the secret (non-open-access) content of Li-Ng 2009 to cite what are presumably some speculations by the authors that in the light of their earlier results, probably a higher dose and/or duration are needed for a protective effect.

Probably this is just a coincidence - i'm not really suggesting that all the other journal references are faked. However, their practical verifiability is a lot less than it should be. And a devil's advocate could rather worry about the coincidence.

But in any case, something practical for anyone wishing to improve the rather tragic closed-access status of the references at the moment would be to search e.g. on 'nih gov' to at least find the abstracts, and hopefully in some cases full (non-subscription) articles, and add this information to the references. Boud (talk) 22:51, 4 November 2009 (UTC)


 * The refs look OK to me, try searching for abstracts in PubMed or Google Scholar. Tim Vickers (talk) 23:20, 4 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Nice work :). Hopefully some other people can join in and help. BTW, there's a section started on Talk:Vitamin_D regarding Amway/Bayer/GlaxoSmithKline/etc. influence in Vitamin D research/advocacy. E.g. see http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_strauss/20080213.html . Boud (talk) 00:17, 7 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Vitamin D is not patentable, and belongs to nobody. Thus, any concerns about anyone profiting from it pale in comparison to what's going on with patented drugs. --Dyuku (talk) 16:00, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

300% fewer
"... resulted in 50% fewer respiratory viral infections and 300% fewer days of absences": that 300% figure can't possibly be right: the number of days' absence can't go negative. I wonder whether we have any Russian-speakers with access to the study who can tell us what the number should really be. Markuswp (talk) 14:44, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Copyvio issues
As I read through this article, I find that chunks of the language are lifted directly or in some cases with minimal modification from copyrighted writings of John Cannell. I don't think this is acceptable, nor do I find the excessive reliance on interpretation of primary literature to be particularly encyclopaedic. Keepcalmandcarryon (talk) 00:54, 27 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Rather than ask for deletion because of the many blatant copyright violations that included but were not limited to the writings of Cannell, I removed several sections that were simply pasted together from a variety of sources. Beyond copyright violations, the article as it stood was also riddled with synthesis. Using review articles from RS, it might be possible to add some of the information back to the article. Keepcalmandcarryon (talk) 01:17, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

new review article (2020) and meta-analysis (2017) to consider
Grant, William B., et al. "Evidence that vitamin D supplementation could reduce risk of influenza and COVID-19 infections and deaths." Nutrients 12.4 (2020): 988. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/4/988

Martineau, Adrian R., et al. "Vitamin D supplementation to prevent acute respiratory tract infections: systematic review and meta-analysis of individual participant data." bmj 356 (2017). https://www.bmj.com/content/356/bmj.i6583

Pigkeeper (talk) 23:43, 6 October 2020 (UTC)


 * This needs a lot of work to update. Any of the vitamin D watchers want to help? Jrfw51 (talk)