Spain in top three in Europe for deaths due to heatwaves

Alfonso Torices

Madrid

Tuesday, 11 July 2023, 16:55

Climate change, with its increasingly frequent, early and long-lasting heatwaves, has led to an increase in deaths caused by extreme temperatures. Scientific research has just quantified in detail the number of summer deaths attributable to excessive heat across Europe and places Spain, along with Italy and Greece, as the countries where this serious phenomenon causes by far the most deaths.

Extreme heat killed 11,324 people in Spain between June and August last year, according to the estimate made in 35 countries on the continent by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre promoted by the La Caixa Foundation, and the French National Institute for Research in Health and Medicine (Inserm). This is almost a fifth of all deaths during the 2022 heatwave in Europe (61,672) and the second-highest figure on the continent, only surpassed by the 18,010 deaths in Italy.

Global warming is progressing rapidly in Europe, but it is hitting southern countries hardest. In 2022, during the hottest summer on record, Spain suffered three powerful heatwaves lasting 41 days, which meant that the average temperature between 30 May and 5 September rose 2.11C above the average of the last three decades.

Record temperatures in the European Mediterranean basin resulted in a very high incidence of deaths per million inhabitants. Between June and August 2022, the heat killed 237 people in Spain per million, double the lethality of this health problem in the rest of Europe, where it did not exceed 114 deaths per million. Only Italy, with 295 deaths per million, and Greece, with 280, had a higher rate than Spain.

The research, published in Nature Medicine, points out that two-thirds of heat-related deaths, almost 39,000 deaths on the continent, were concentrated in the torrid month from 11 July to 14 August and that up to one-sixth of the deaths occurred during the heatwave from 8 to 24 July. ISGlobal did not specify the specific ailments that triggered these deaths, but a recent national institute of statistics (INE) report on mortality in Spain did. High temperatures cause direct deaths due to heat stroke or dehydration, but above all they aggravate chronic pathologies in the elderly, such as hypertension, diabetes, senile disorders, respiratory ailments and covid.

The INE data fits perfectly with ISGlobal's findings. Two thirds of deaths from heatwaves in 2022 were among Europeans over 80 years of age, followed far behind by those between 65 and 79 years of age and with a very low fatality rate among those under 65. Specifically, if the mortality rate due to excess summer heat in Spain is 237 per million, among those under 65 it is 21 and among those over 79 it reaches 3,273. Put simply. There are ten times fewer deaths among the young and active population and there are between thirteen and fourteen times more deaths from heat over the age of 80.

This feature is directly related to another. Two out of every three deaths due to summer heat in Spain (63.5%) are female victims. Women are more sensitive to the pathologies most directly aggravated by high temperatures, but above all they live longer and are the ones who swell the group of people over 80. The heat-related death rate for women is 295 per million, while for men it is 181.

For Hicham Achebak, researcher at Inserm and ISGlobal, the study's conclusions showed that, despite the tragic death toll that Europe already suffered in the scorching summer of 2003, "the adaptation strategies currently available to us - preventive plans, health system response capacity - are still insufficient". "The acceleration of global warming observed over the last ten years underlines the urgency to reassess and substantially strengthen prevention plans, paying particular attention to the differences between European countries and regions, as well as the age and gender gaps, which currently mark the differences in vulnerability to heat," he concluded.

In fact, these scientists calculate that unless Spain and the rest of its continental partners take effective preventive and structural measures to curb global warming and heat-related deaths, the number of deaths from heat in the summer of 2030 will be around 68,000, some 11% more than a year ago, and that in 2040 the number of deaths will be around 94,000, 53% more than the already very high current figures.