New research from Tulane University and the College of William and Mary reported that sending a team to the Super Bowl is linked to the local flu season.

Charles Stoecker, a health economist at Tulane and a co-author of the paper, said there are various reasons for flu cases.

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Football is a contact sport, and watching the game is lousy with contact, too. During the Super Bowl, fans gather close together on couches and bar stools to cheer for their teams.

The game puts a lot of people together to eat and drink and breathe in the same room, making it easier for the flu to spread from person to person.

The game also changes travel patterns, again leading to increased contact with a higher number of people.

The study revealed cities where the championship contenders come from also have increased flu deaths by at least 18 percent among those over 65 in the two cities. The analysis was based on county-level statistics from 1974 to 2009.

The third is that Super Bowl is also lucrative for bars and restaurants.

"You want to be out, you want to be seen, you want to celebrate your team's success in a very public way. Let's say that a city sees a spike in bar attendance as people celebrate the victory. There are more jobs created in tourism and entertainment, and it could be that those workers are facilitating the spread. You're pulling in workers from a sector where they don't have a whole lot of mixing contact, and you're putting them in the amusement and recreation sector, where they do," Stoecker said.

Apart from increased flu deaths, the Super Bowl is also known to increase prostitution, causing more prostitution-related arrests during the course of the big event. This frequently occurs in the host city.

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