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https://www.sciencealert.com/last-summer-was-so-hot-it-killed-over-60000-people-in-europe>
"More than 61,000 people died due to the heat during Europe's record-breaking
summer last year, a study said on Monday which called for more to be done to
protect against even deadlier heatwaves expected in the coming years.
The world's fastest warming continent experienced its hottest summer on record
in 2022, as countries were hit by blistering heatwaves, crop-withering droughts
and devastating wildfires.
The European Union's statistics agency Eurostat had reported an unusually high
number of excess deaths over the summer, but the amount directly linked to the
heat had not been previously quantified.
A team of researchers looked at data on temperature and mortality from 2015 to
2022 for 823 regions across 35 European countries, covering a total of 543
million people.
The researchers from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health and France's
health research institute INSERM used models to predict the deaths attributable
to temperature for each region in every week of 2022's summer.
They estimated that 61,672 deaths were linked to the heat between May 30 and
September 4 last year, according to the study published in the journal
Nature
Medicine.
A particularly intense heatwave in the week of July 18-24 caused more than
11,600 deaths alone, the study said.
"It is a very high number of deaths," said Hicham Achebak, an INSERM researcher
and study co-author.
"We knew the effect of heat on mortality after 2003, but with this analysis, we
see that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to protect the
population," he told
AFP.
More than 70,000 excess deaths were recorded in 2003 during one of the worst
heatwaves in European history."
Via Rixty Dixet.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
