This becomes obvious while looking at hospital papers

Mar 4, 2009 11:58 GMT  ·  By

A new scientific study conducted in Europe has pointed out the fact that warm and humid days are very likely to trigger a spike in hospital admissions for people suffering from a wide range of respiratory diseases. The researchers in charge of the investigation, who have published their results in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, say that, as global warming progresses, authorities should prepare better, for the number of such occurrences will increase drastically from day to day.

Estimating the number of people that could get affected and might need hospitalization within the time frame of a year is close to impossible, as doctors and other health care managers have no way of knowing exactly what temperatures the thermometers will record each day. And the even worse news is that it seems the individuals most affected by these changes in daily temperatures are those who are seventy-five years of age or older. In their cases, admissions on hot days rise on average 4.5 percent every twenty four hours.

For the new report, Rome Local Health Authority investigator Dr. Paola Michelozzi and her colleagues have analyzed the admission papers of hospitals from 12 European cities, spanning a period of three years, to make sure that the trend is constant. She has cross-referenced these papers with sheets from meteorological agencies, which have supplied her team with data as to what the temperatures were in each of the cities in every single day of the three years.

She has learned that a direct correlation exists between the two factors, and that not even younger people are spared. Among the conditions that get worse with heat, she mentions the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, emphysema and chronic bronchitis. The researcher also pinpoints that elderly COPD sufferers experience inflamed airways when it's hot outside, and that this makes them hyperventilated, thus remaining breathless. With age, the risks posed by such a condition can no longer be ignored, so the seniors end up in hospitals.

“Under climate change scenarios, the increase in extreme weather events and certain air pollutants, especially ozone, are likely to further aggravate chronic respiratory diseases. Public health interventions should be directed at preventing this additional burden of disease during the summer season,” the team writes in the Conclusions section of its report.