Although the heat impact has become one of the current challenges of public health, measuring its footprint in terms of loss of human life it’s key. In this sense, a report published in summer It already pointed to a mortality in Europe of more than 60,000 during 2022, but a recent one puts it at more than 70,000.
The results, published in The Lancet Regional Health – Europerevalue upwards the first estimates of mortality associated with the record temperatures on the European continent.
The work is led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a center promoted by the “la Caixa” Foundation. In the previous study, published in the journal Nature Medicinethe same authors used epidemiological models applied to weekly temperature and mortality data in 823 regions of 35 European countries to estimate premature mortality of 62,862 people during the year 2022.
The authors themselves recognized that the use of weekly data caused an underestimation of mortality attributed to heat, since daily data series required to accurately estimate the impact of warm temperatures on mortality.
From ISGlobal, Joan Ballester Claramunt, the researcher who leads the EARLY-ADAPT project of the European Research Council, points out that “in general, we find that the use of monthly aggregate data does not allow us to estimate the short-term effects of environmental temperatures.”