Hurricanes Kill People for Years after the Initial Disaster
By Andrea Thompson, Scientific American.
Excerpt: More than 160 people have lost their lives to the ferocious winds and catastrophic flooding wrought by Hurricane Helene. But the true death toll will take years—likely more than a decade—to unfold. A new study published on Wednesday in Nature found that the average tropical cyclone in the U.S. ultimately causes about 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths (those beyond what would typically be expected), compared with the average of 24 direct deaths reported in official statistics. The study’s authors estimated that, between 1950 and 2015, tropical storms and hurricanes caused between 3.6 million and 5.2 million excess deaths—more than those caused by traffic deaths or infectious diseases. And such storm-related deaths involve people from some groups more than others, marking an “important and understudied contributor to health in the United States, particularly for young or Black populations,” the authors wrote. ...The biggest risk was found to be for infants under the age of one, with almost all of these deaths occurring within less than two years after a storm. Young says that this effect could be influenced by people’s inability to afford prenatal care in a storm’s wake, as well as stress or other factors. The risk of death was also higher among Black people than it was among white people, even though the white population that was exposed to storms was much larger than the exposed Black population....