Heat is killing more people than ever. Scientists are looking for ways to lower the risk

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https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/heat-killing-more-people-ever-scientists-are-looking-ways-lower-risk

Source:  By Elizabeth Pennisi. 

Excerpt: High body temperatures are inevitable in firefighting: A study in 2013 uncovered about 50 heat-related injuries across the United States during that fire season. But ...Warmth from the firefighters’ physical exertion, not heat from the fires, was the greatest danger, the researchers found. Another surprise: “The assumption across the fire community was that if somebody went down, it was because they just didn’t drink enough water,” Orcasitas says. But the team found otherwise. “You can’t drink yourself out of a heat-related injury,” explains project leader Joseph Domitrovich, an exercise physiologist at the U.S. Forest Service’s National Technology and Development Program. ...researchers like Domitrovich are working to pin down how heat affects workers and vulnerable populations, such as the elderly. They are studying low-tech measures—sometimes nothing more than a splash of cold water on the skin—to make people safer and more comfortable in hot conditions. ...The work has taken on urgency as global temperatures rise, heat waves become more frequent and intense, and casualties mount. Between 1999 and 2010, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention logged 8081 heat-related deaths in the United States, one-third of them in people age 65 or older. Already, about one-third of the world’s population experiences conditions that create heat stress, says Nathan Bradley Morris, a human thermal physiologist at the University of Copenhagen. At high risk are construction workers and farm hands, respectively 13 times and 35 times as likely to die from heat as other workers. ...Amplifying the trends, the world’s population is moving to cities, which tend to be hotter than the countryside, ....  

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