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News ID: 54984
Publish Date : 11 July 2018 - 21:23

About 70 Deaths Linked to Heat Wave in Canada

TORONTO (NPR) -- An estimated 70 deaths have been connected to the scorching temperatures and humidity that rolled over Canada's Quebec province last week, and officials say the number may rise as hospital and nursing home records are reviewed.
Most of the people who died as the region reached temperatures up to 95 degrees are elderly men and women living alone in apartments with no air conditioning, and many had chronic health conditions.
David Kaiser, a physician manager at the Montreal Regional Department of Public Health, confirmed to NPR that 34 of the deaths occurred in the city from June 29 through July 7. With few exceptions, he said, the people were over the age of 50, many between 65 to 85. About 60% were men and most had an underlying medical or mental health condition, Kaiser added.
He explained the death toll has continued to rise despite a return to more normal seasonal temperatures, as the public health department continues to collect data from a variety of sources. Officials plan to issue an updated report next week.
And now that the immediate crisis is over, the department will soon embark on an even deeper dive into the records of every person who died during the eight-day window, including coroner reports and medical charts, a Montreal public health spokesman told NPR.
"We do this because it's always possible that we may have missed someone who maybe didn't die of heatstroke but died due to heat-related complications ... those can be hard to tell sometimes," Kaiser said.
It is a practice that was implemented after Montreal's 2010 heat wave that left 106 people dead. In that case, authorities discovered a handful heat-related hospital deaths that had previously gone unreported, Kaiser recalled.
Paul Brunet, president of the Council for the Protection of the Sick, a patient advocacy group, called for an independent investigation into the abrupt deaths of all people who recently died in a hospital, public nursing home or a public long-term care residential facility known as a CHSLD.
"Some figures that we have had in recent years do not always correspond to reality," Paul Brunet explained in an interview with LCN on Saturday.