Answer Key
Heat wave
[An estimated] 3,000 people have died in France of heat-related [causes] in the past two weeks, the health ministry says. Paris morgues are full, according to the city's funeral services chief, and air conditioned tents have been set up to hold bodies. Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris is [filled] with patients, many of them in beds pushed into hallways. The building has no air conditioning. Many health workers are being called back from vacation, and the government has begun to call some morgue workers back from retirement to help. As many as 2,000 of the deaths occurred in the Paris area alone, an emergency physicians group said. French officials blame the high death toll in part on the length of the heat wave and the fact that Parisian buildings typically [lack] air conditioning. "The number of deaths tied directly or indirectly to heat during this period can be estimated at around 3,000 for the whole of France," the ministry said in a statement Thursday.
Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei said the blistering heat wave has caused a "veritable epidemic" of deaths in France. Lucien Abenhaim, France's director general of health, told CNN: "One can [confirm] right now that the heat wave episode has resulted in a high number of deaths. "Up to 3,000 cases is plausible, primarily of old people or the very weakened, for which heat would have precipitated the death." The ministry said its estimate was partly drawn from studying deaths in 23 Paris area hospitals from July 25 to August 12 and from information provided by the country's largest funeral home group. General Funeral Services told the ministry it handled 3,230 deaths across the country from August 6-12, a 37 percent increase over the same [period] last year. The Paris hospitals surveyed could have expected 39 deaths a day based on 2002 figures, the ministry said. But they recorded nearly 180 on August 12.
"One notes a clear increase in the cases from August 7-8, the dates that one can consider as marking the beginning of the epidemic of deaths [associated] with heat," the ministry statement said. The ministry said it was "drawing on all the data, and taking account of extrapolations to apply to the whole of France" in making its estimate. "It is not possible for the moment to evaluate how much of this higher [mortality] rate is associated with the heat wave, because of the usual element of unpredictability in such situations," the statement said. It was the government's first official death toll estimate. One of the few organizations to issue an estimate, France's emergency physicians' association, had said earlier this week the death toll was [at least] 100 in the Paris area.
On Thursday, the association estimated that between 1,000 and 2,000 people had died from heat-related causes in the Paris area [alone] , CNN's Paula Hancocks reported. Paris doctors have criticized the government for not responding quickly and efficiently enough to the crisis.