Global Courant
An unusually intense heat wave has swept northern India over the past four days, with some hospitals in the state of Uttar Pradesh recording higher than normal death tolls. Doctors there are convinced there is a link between the punishing temperatures and the deaths of their patients, but officials are investigating what role the dangerous combination of heat and humidity played in the rise in the death rate.
In Ballia District, with a population of about three million, the daily high temperature hovered around 43 degrees Celsius (above 109 degrees Fahrenheit), nine degrees hotter than normal, in addition to relative humidity as high as 53 percent. On June 15, 16 and 17, dozens of deaths were recorded in hospitals there.
Dr. Jayant Kumar, the chief medical officer of Ballia district, near Bihar state, said 23 people died in the district on Thursday. The next day, 11 more succumbed. “The number of deaths is more than normal,” said Dr. Kumar.
He told the Press Trust of India, a news agency, that an average of eight people die every day. “Most of these are natural deaths,” he told The Times in a telephone interview, “most of the deaths are elderly people suffering from various conditions such as diabetes.”
But Indian government officials have resisted linking the deaths too directly to the punishing heat.
Dr. Diwakar Singh, formerly the chief medical superintendent of Ballia district, told reporters on Friday night that 34 people had died of heat stroke at the main hospital under his supervision. The next day, he was reprimanded by the state government for drawing that conclusion prematurely and removed from office.
The government has since sent a scientific team from the capital Lucknow to investigate the causes.
Dr. Singh’s replacement, Dr. SK Yadav, took a more cautious stance on Sunday, saying “Elderly patients with comorbidities such as hypertension and diabetes are dying because of heat.”
“Still,” he added in a telephone interview, “death rates are above normal.” He agreed with Dr Kumar’s assessment that the excessive heat was the cause of the high death toll, regardless of the exact connection.
While an extraordinary number of patients were admitted for heat-related complaints, Dr Yadav said: “We are able to provide beds for all patients and we have enough doctors and medicines.”
The nightmarish prospect of mass deaths from a sudden rise in temperature has become more urgent in recent years. And the phenomenon in this part of the world may be a warning beyond India’s borders.
The heat in this part of India hovers around the critical “wet-bulb temperature,” the threshold above which the human body cannot cool itself to a point survivable by perspiration, defined as 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit), adjusted for 100 percent humidity . The wet bulb reading in Ballia on Saturday reached 34.15 degrees Celsius (about 93 degrees Fahrenheit).
More elderly or sick patients than usual are expected to die in heat waves like this one, which climate change has made more common in India’s historically torrid plains, as in most of the world, scientists say.
The question is whether these are ‘excess deaths’, the kind that can only be measured statistically, or whether India’s increasingly unbearable weather plays a more direct role in causing them, from heat stroke, for example. If more deaths are registered than expected, these count as deductible. But that leaves open the question of what exactly caused them.
Local newspaperscompiling figures from various officials and hospitals, have counted as many as 54 deaths in Ballia and another 44 in Bihar in the past three days.
In April, as temperatures in the western state of Maharashtra approached their peak, at least 11 people are known to have died of heat stroke almost simultaneously.
A particularly humid city like Kolkata now exceeds the expected limit of human survivability to heat using only transpiration for cooling several times a year; some epidemiologists are surprised that more Indians aren’t dropping dead from the heat.
The fact that wet-bulb temperatures are approaching critical levels across much of South Asia has sparked global concern in recent years. It has even found its way into literature. “The Ministry for the Future”, a science fiction novel written by Kim Stanley Robinson in 2020, envisions a scenario where 20 million Indian citizens living in the same part of the country – men, women and children – are killed by an intense heat wave in a week, instantly changing the course of history.
The hottest weather in the region breaks every June. A cyclonic storm, the equivalent of a hurricane in the Indian Ocean, pushed through India’s west coast late last week and rains are expected to arrive in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar within the next two days. That should lower the temperature from their highest level. Soon after, the region can expect the annual monsoon.
The diagnosis by the Lucknow medical team analyzing last week’s excess deaths may not mention heat stroke. In that case, it will most likely describe a situation like the deadly heat wave that hit Chicago in July 1995, which killed 700 people, or the one that killed tens of thousands in Europe in August 2003.
There is no doubt that the kind of weather that is becoming more common on every continent is causing more people to die more quickly than they would in colder times.
