Heatwave in France: almost 300 daily visits to emergency rooms at the peak of the heat in August

The use of heat-related emergency care increased significantly in France during the August heatwave, the French public health agency noted on Wednesday, August 20, with almost 300 daily visits to emergency rooms at the peak of the episode.

"The use of care for the composite health indicator iHeatwave peaked between August 11 and 17, with a maximum of 286 visits to emergency rooms and 67 SOS doctors' consultations," summarizes the health agency in a report for the period from August 8 to 18.

This corresponds to the passage of a significant heat wave in France, the second of the summer after a first episode at the end of June and the beginning of July, where many departments were placed on orange alert, or even red for some of them.

The iHeatwave indicator serves to provide an initial, still very fragmentary, idea of the health effects of the heatwave. It compiles visits to hospital emergency rooms and calls to SOS Médecins for illnesses directly linked to the heatwave—dehydration, hyperthermia, or heatstroke—in departments affected by orange and red alerts.

At the height of this heatwave, around August 15, heat-related emergency room visits regularly exceeded 250 per day in the affected departments. This, however, remains below the more than 600 visits recorded for July ¹ , the peak of the first heatwave.

The elderly remain the most affected: "people aged 75 and over accounted for around 60% of hospitalizations following a visit to iCanicule" during the August heatwave, specifies Public Health France. But other age groups are also affected by the increase in emergency care. "Those aged 15-44 were particularly affected by hyperthermia, and accounted for 40 to 60% of the activity for this cause," notes the health agency.

This initial assessment does not allow us to predict the mortality rate linked to the heatwave, because the effects of the heat are not all immediate. Public Health France generally needs a month to calculate the number of deaths above normal, and then even longer to estimate how many people actually died due to the heat.

Scorching temperatures, such as those recorded recently, illustrate the increase and intensification of heat waves in Europe, a direct consequence of global warming, according to scientists.