Grateful to have the opportunity to speak at the 3rd Annual Heat and Health Summit at UC San Diego today. There were so many interesting issues raised, but today I am going to focus on one single issue that is very important but often overlooked: gaps in heat-related health data.
Heat-related deaths and illnesses are highly underestimated in the U.S. If a farmworker goes to the Emergency Department with a heat-related rash, it will most likely be attributed to a skin allergy. If a farmworker or a construction worker dies due to heart failure while working outdoors, it will probably be attributed to cardiovascular disease, not to heat. The same goes for many other diseases. Whether mental illnesses, kidney failure, immune diseases, or reproductive diseases, almost all would be attributed to something else even if they were triggered or caused by heat.
And then there are data gaps between federal, state, and county levels. For example, the National Weather Service database shows that there were only 207 heat-related deaths in 2023 in the entire U.S. However, Maricopa County in Arizona alone reported 645 heat-related deaths in 2023. Who is going to harmonize these databases? Nobody?
When Europe is reporting 50,000–60,000 heat-related deaths in a single summer, the U.S. database shows about 4,000 annual heat-related deaths. It is beyond comprehension.
There is also the issue of data accessibility. Healthcare data has been overly protected in the name of privacy. De-identified heat- or asthma-related ED visits and death data are publicly available from portals such as Tracking California, but if you go and ask your federal or state Department of Public Health to provide the same data at a more granular level (weekly), you will be asked to go through such a lengthy process that most people give up at one stage or another. Researchers, students, and modelers rely on these data to develop better forecasting models and tools, but in this situation that is not going to happen.
There is a lot to do! But it seems nothing significant is going to happen unless people in position or authority actually care.
God bless!