The News
The rate of emergency room visits caused by heat illness increased significantly last year in large swaths of the country compared with the previous five years, according to a study published on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The research, which analyzed visits during the warmer months of the year, offers new insight into the medical consequences of the record-breaking heat recorded across the country in 2023 as sweltering temperatures stretched late into the year.
What the Numbers Say: People in the South were especially affected by serious heat illness.
The researchers used data on emergency room visits from an electronic surveillance program used by states and the federal government to detect the spread of diseases. They compiled the number of heat-related emergency room visits in different regions of the country and compared them to data from the previous five years.
Nearly 120,000 heat-related emergency room visits were recorded in the surveillance program last year, with more than 90 percent of them occurring between May and September, the researchers found.
The highest rate of visits occurred in a region encompassing Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. Overall, the study also found that men and people between the ages of 18 and 64 had higher rates of visits.
How It Happens: Heat can be a silent killer, experts and health providers say.
Last year was the warmest on Earth in a century and a half, with the hottest summer on record. Climate scientists have attributed the trend in part to greenhouse gas emissions and their effects on global warming, and they have warned that the timing of a shift in tropical weather patterns last year could foreshadow an even hotter 2024.
Heat illness often occurs gradually over the course of hours, and it can cause major damage to the body’s organs. Early symptoms of heat illness can include fatigue, dehydration, nausea, headache, increased heart rate and muscle spasms.
People do not typically think of themselves as at high risk of succumbing to heat or at greater risk than they once were, causing them to underestimate how a heat wave could lead them to the emergency room, said Kristie L. Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington who is an expert on the health risks of extreme heat.
“The heat you were asked to manage 10 years ago is not the heat you’re being asked to manage today,” she said. One of the first symptoms of heat illness can be confusion, she added, making it harder for someone to respond without help from others.
What Happens Next: States and hospitals are gearing up for another summer of extreme heat.
Dr. Srikanth Paladugu, an epidemiologist at the New Mexico Department of Health, said the state had nearly 450 heat-related emergency room visits in July last year alone and over 900 between April and September, more than double the number recorded during that stretch in 2019.
In preparation for this year’s warmer months, state officials are working to coordinate cooling shelters and areas where people can be splashed by water, Dr. Paladugu said.
Dr. Aneesh Narang, an emergency medicine physician at Banner-University Medical Center in Phoenix, said he often saw roughly half a dozen heat stroke cases a day last summer, including patients with body temperatures of 106 or 107 degrees. Heat illness patients require enormous resources, he added, including ice packs, fans, misters and cooling blankets.
“There’s so much that has to happen in the first few minutes to give that patient a chance for survival,” he said.
Dr. Narang said hospital employees had already begun evaluating protocols and working to ensure that there are enough supplies to contend with the expected number of heat illness patients this year.
“Every year now we’re doing this earlier and earlier,” he said. “We know that the chances are it’s going to be the same or worse.”
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