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France faces heatwave death count
AP - The macabre and painstaking task of tallying a death toll from France's heatwave is overwhelming doctors, police and bureaucrats, who must determine if thousands of elderly victims succumbed to record temperatures or illness and old age.
For now, the estimates are staggering and the facts are few. What is known is that most of the victims from two weeks of scorching August heat were elderly, and many died alone, their bodies left to decompose in intense heat.
Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin was to meet this evening with health experts to study why so many died. As pressure mounted on France's government to launch a full inquiry, local officials around the country faced the challenges of counting the corpses.
"It's an enormous task," said Elsa Vidal, of the Health Watch Institute, or INVS, a government agency charged with determining the official number of heat-related deaths.
There are 36,000 communes in France, and every one of them has been instructed to send their local death certificates from the first three weeks of August to Paris - by fax.
"The faxes are running day and night," said Vidal, who does not expect the work to finish for weeks. "Hundreds of death certificates have arrived. We're expecting thousands."
Before being faxed, the death certificates must be issued by local doctors, then sent to local mayors' offices for record keeping. Those offices then fax them to the health institute in Paris.
France's largest undertaker has estimated 10,000 deaths. The government initially said that figure was probably correct, but then called recent estimates unreliable.
France's centre-right government has come under heavy criticism for not doing enough to prevent deaths as temperatures soared to 40 Celsius. Opposition parties want an inquiry - a demand supported Tuesday by Jean-Louis Debre, a leading lawmaker from the governing UMP party and president of the National Assembly.
"OurGerman, Belgian, Luxembourg neighbours were subject to the same heatwave, and it seems that the consequences in those countries have been less severe than in France," Debre said on Europe-1 radio. "We must find out why."
The meeting Raffarin was hosting this evening was to be a first step in government plans to rectify failings in France's widely respected health system, which struggled to cope with victims of the heat.
One of the biggest factors was timing. August is the traditional month for summer vacation in France, and many have accused families of abandoning their elderly relatives at home - and then delaying burials until after the holiday.
Hospitals and doctors offices were also understaffed, severely limiting the capacity of France's emergency services.
"Police were submerged with calls saying, 'I have a body, what should I do with it? The undertakers aren't coming, the doctors aren't coming, everyone is overwhelmed,'" said Mohamed Douhane, the spokesman for Synergie Officiers, a police union that represents detectives.
"Now the heatwave has passed, but police are still submerged in investigating deaths," he said. "What we can say, is that it was a true massacre."
Many victims were found several days after dying, making it more difficult to determine the cause of death. Another challenge for investigators is determining how much a role the heat played in each death.
"There are direct causes, like heat stroke, but also indirect causes where people were weakened by an illness or age," said Vidal of the Health Watch Institute. "Heat stroke isn't an illness."
The final figure will be based on a mixture of hard data and estimates, Vidal said. The investigation considers the number of deaths definitively caused by heat; the number of calls made to emergency services during the heatwave; and the increase in deaths in the first three weeks of August compared to last year.
Meanwhile, a panel of experts appointed by the HealthMinistry is conducting a parallel investigation, using identical raw data. The findings of the two investigations will be compared before an official death toll is released.
Adding another grim twist is the likelihood that not all the bodies have been found, said Laurence Dassand, a ministry spokeswoman.
"It is possible that in coming days and weeks, we'll discover other people who died alone," Dassand said. "In cases like that, determining a cause of death is even more difficult."
©AAP 2003
AP - The macabre and painstaking task of tallying a death toll from France's heatwave is overwhelming doctors, police and bureaucrats, who must determine if thousands of elderly victims succumbed to record temperatures or illness and old age.
For now, the estimates are staggering and the facts are few. What is known is that most of the victims from two weeks of scorching August heat were elderly, and many died alone, their bodies left to decompose in intense heat.
Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin was to meet this evening with health experts to study why so many died. As pressure mounted on France's government to launch a full inquiry, local officials around the country faced the challenges of counting the corpses.
"It's an enormous task," said Elsa Vidal, of the Health Watch Institute, or INVS, a government agency charged with determining the official number of heat-related deaths.
There are 36,000 communes in France, and every one of them has been instructed to send their local death certificates from the first three weeks of August to Paris - by fax.
"The faxes are running day and night," said Vidal, who does not expect the work to finish for weeks. "Hundreds of death certificates have arrived. We're expecting thousands."
Before being faxed, the death certificates must be issued by local doctors, then sent to local mayors' offices for record keeping. Those offices then fax them to the health institute in Paris.
France's largest undertaker has estimated 10,000 deaths. The government initially said that figure was probably correct, but then called recent estimates unreliable.
France's centre-right government has come under heavy criticism for not doing enough to prevent deaths as temperatures soared to 40 Celsius. Opposition parties want an inquiry - a demand supported Tuesday by Jean-Louis Debre, a leading lawmaker from the governing UMP party and president of the National Assembly.
"OurGerman, Belgian, Luxembourg neighbours were subject to the same heatwave, and it seems that the consequences in those countries have been less severe than in France," Debre said on Europe-1 radio. "We must find out why."
The meeting Raffarin was hosting this evening was to be a first step in government plans to rectify failings in France's widely respected health system, which struggled to cope with victims of the heat.
One of the biggest factors was timing. August is the traditional month for summer vacation in France, and many have accused families of abandoning their elderly relatives at home - and then delaying burials until after the holiday.
Hospitals and doctors offices were also understaffed, severely limiting the capacity of France's emergency services.
"Police were submerged with calls saying, 'I have a body, what should I do with it? The undertakers aren't coming, the doctors aren't coming, everyone is overwhelmed,'" said Mohamed Douhane, the spokesman for Synergie Officiers, a police union that represents detectives.
"Now the heatwave has passed, but police are still submerged in investigating deaths," he said. "What we can say, is that it was a true massacre."
Many victims were found several days after dying, making it more difficult to determine the cause of death. Another challenge for investigators is determining how much a role the heat played in each death.
"There are direct causes, like heat stroke, but also indirect causes where people were weakened by an illness or age," said Vidal of the Health Watch Institute. "Heat stroke isn't an illness."
The final figure will be based on a mixture of hard data and estimates, Vidal said. The investigation considers the number of deaths definitively caused by heat; the number of calls made to emergency services during the heatwave; and the increase in deaths in the first three weeks of August compared to last year.
Meanwhile, a panel of experts appointed by the HealthMinistry is conducting a parallel investigation, using identical raw data. The findings of the two investigations will be compared before an official death toll is released.
Adding another grim twist is the likelihood that not all the bodies have been found, said Laurence Dassand, a ministry spokeswoman.
"It is possible that in coming days and weeks, we'll discover other people who died alone," Dassand said. "In cases like that, determining a cause of death is even more difficult."
©AAP 2003
