An unusually intense heatwave has hit northern India over the past four days, with some hospitals in Uttar Pradesh recording higher death tolls than usual. Local doctors believe there is a link between extreme temperatures and patient deaths, but officials are unsure what role the dangerous combination of heat and humidity played in the increased mortality. We are investigating whether
In the Barrier District, which has a population of about 3 million, the maximum daytime temperature during the same period hovered around 43 degrees Celsius. 109 degrees Fahrenheit), 9 degrees hotter than usual, Relative humidity reaches 53%. Dozens of deaths were recorded in local hospitals on June 15, 16 and 17.
Dr. Jayant Kumar, chief medical officer of Barrier district near Bihar, said 23 people died in the district on Thursday. Eleven more died the next day. “The death toll was higher than usual,” Dr. Kumar said.
He told news agency Press Trust of India that an average of eight people die each day. “Most of them are natural deaths and most of the dead are elderly people with various ailments such as diabetes,” he said in a telephone interview with The Times.
But Indian officials are opposed to directly linking the death toll to the heat.
Dr. Diwakar Singh, the former chief medical director of Baria district, told reporters on Friday evening that 34 people had died of heatstroke at the hospital under his supervision. the next day, he was reprimanded Condemned by the state government for prematurely reaching its conclusions, he was forced out of office.
Since then, the government has sent a scientific team from the provincial capital Lucknow to investigate the cause.
Dr Singh’s successor, Dr SK Yadav, took a more cautious stance on Sunday, saying “older patients with comorbidities such as hypertension and diabetes are dying from fever”.
“Still, the death toll is higher than usual,” he added in a phone interview. He agreed with Dr. Kumar’s assessment that excess heat was responsible for the high death toll, whatever the exact link.
An unusual number of patients are hospitalized suffering from heat stroke, but Dr. Yadav said, “We are able to provide beds for all patients and we have enough doctors and medicines.” .
The nightmare prospect of mass deaths caused by soaring temperatures has become more urgent in recent years. And the phenomenon in this part of the world may portend alarms beyond India’s borders.
The heat in this part of India is hovering around the critical ‘wet bulb temperature’. Above this temperature, the human body cannot cool itself down to a viable temperature by perspiration. This temperature is defined as 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) adjusted for air temperature. 100 percent humidity. Barrier’s wet-bulb reading on Saturday reached 34.15 degrees Celsius (about 93 degrees Fahrenheit).
Heatwaves like this one are expected to kill more elderly and infirm patients than usual, scientists say, and as in most parts of the world, the historically scorching Indian plains are also expected to die. Heatwaves are becoming more common due to climate change.
The question is whether these are the kind of “excess deaths” that can only be measured statistically, or whether India’s increasingly unbearable weather plays a more direct role in causing excess deaths, such as heat stroke. That is. If more deaths than expected are recorded, they are counted as overages. But that leaves the question of what exactly caused them.
local newspaperA compilation of figures from various officials and hospitals tallied 54 deaths in Barrier over the past three days, with another 44 in Bihar.
At least 11 people are known to have died from heatstroke around the same time in April, when temperatures in western Maharashtra were nearing peak.
A particularly humid city like Kolkata now exceeds human survivability limits to the heat just a few times a year by sweating for cooling. Some epidemiologists are baffled that more Indians aren’t dying from the heat.
The fact that wet bulb temperatures are approaching dangerous levels in many parts of South Asia has caused global concern in recent years. It also makes its way into literature. The 2020 sci-fi novel Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson is based on a scenario in which 20 million Indians (men, women and children) living in the same part of the country are murdered in violent riots. is drawing Within a week, a heat wave arrived and quickly changed the course of history.
The hottest weather in the region starts in June each year. A cyclone storm, equivalent to a hurricane in the Indian Ocean, passed over India’s west coast late last week, with rain expected to reach Uttar Pradesh and Bihar within the next two days. Then the temperature should drop from the highest level. An annual monsoon is expected in the region shortly thereafter.
Heatstroke may not have been mentioned in the diagnosis by the Lucknow medical team analyzing excess deaths last week. In that case, it would depict conditions like the deadly heat wave that hit Chicago in July 1995, killing an estimated 700 people, and the heat wave that killed tens of thousands in Europe in August 2003. Probability is high.
What is beyond doubt is that such weather is becoming more and more common on each continent and more people are dying earlier than in the cooler months.
