Heat-Related Mortality in Selected United States Cities, Summer 1999

Abstract

As part of a public health response to severe heat waves in the midwestern and northeastern United States in the summer of 1999, the authors actively solicited the number of heat-related deaths from 38 medical examiner and coroner jurisdictions comprising 35 metropolitan areas to enumerate heat-related deaths in areas affected by heat waves. They also determined the usefulness of these data for surveillance and rapid investigation of heat-related deaths. A total of 334 heat-related deaths were reported during the study period of July 1 - August 31. Minor changes in data collection and diagnostic criteria in some medical examiner and coroner jurisdictions would allow for greater comparability among jurisdictions. The National Association of Medical Examiners' position paper on heat-related mortality diagnosis provides important guidance to medical examiners and coroners regarding the certification of heat-related deaths and may require some refinement to address certain issues. Among these are certifying manner of death and classifying potential causes of heat-related death not involving hyperthermia or heat stroke, but where heat is a potential contributing factor to death. Medical examiners and coroners are an important resource for heat-related mortality research, and improvements in data collection and reporting could yield tremendous benefits to our understanding of and interventions for heat-related deaths.

Impact of the 2003 Heatwave on All-Cause Mortality in 9 French Cities

“…We studied all-cause mortality (International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision codes A00 -R99) because high temperatures are thought to be a contributing factor in deaths from a variety of causes. 14 Table 1 shows the size of the population and the daily mean number of deaths in each city from all causes, for all ages, and for people over 65 years, from 1996 to 2003. Mortality data were obtained from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE).…”

The impact of major heat waves on all-cause and cause-specific mortality in France from 1971 to 2003

“…Several studies considered heat-related deaths to be those for which heat was cited as the cause in the medical records (CDC 2002;Nakai et al 1999;Weisskopf et al 2002;Wolfe et al 2001). The resulting heat-related death count has been shown to be markedly smaller than the overall excess mortality observed during HW, particularly when the cause of death was not certified by specially trained physicians (Shen et al 1998).…”

Fatalities Associated With the Termination of Electrical Services

“…Numerous reports in the forensic literature have described heat-related deaths, however, few have specifically addressed deaths resulting from the termination of electrical services. 15,16 A single report describes a 37-yearold male who died of environmental hyperthermia after a power failure occurred in is home resulting in an ambient temperature of greater than 90°F. 17 This and other works also address significant risk factors to heatstroke and heat-related deaths.…”