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European Heatwave 2
Thu Dec 25, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Today, correspondent Bob Henson looks back at
the astonishing heat wave of 2003.
BH: Could it really be that 15,000 Europeans died this summer just because of heat? Eric
Klinenberg, author of "Heat Wave," says it's easy to underestimate heat-related deaths.
EK: In France, government officials and scientific officials used the excess death rate,
which is the number of people who died in excess of the norm for a given period of time. And
that's why France got the number of around 15,000. On the other hand, several other European
nations gave much more conservative measures of heat-related mortality. In some places, a
heat death was only counted if someone came into the hospital, died there, and had no other
preexisting conditions, so the numbers were in the 10s and 20s.
BH: But these numbers are way low, says Larry Kalkstein of the University of Delaware.
Kalkstein has helped four Italian cities put successful heat-warning systems in place. He
thinks this summer's heat in Italy may have claimed over a thousand lives.
LK: I mean looking at the baseline and noting on a day if the baseline in a city in Italy is
100, and on a hot day 200 people die, we call that 100 heat related deaths. After the heat
wave we sometimes, but not always, see a dip in mortality, so we've estimated that somewhere
between a fifth and a third of the deaths that occur during a heat wave would have occurred
anyway shortly afterward because these people were very sick or ill. However, that still
means that four-fifths to two-thirds would not have occurred shortly afterward, which of
course is the big problem.
Thanks to Bob Henson for today's story. We receive support from Subaru of America, and the
National Science Foundation.
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