The death toll caused by the August heat wave in France has reached an unexpected and unprecedented high.
Figure 1.
French health minister Jean-François Mattei talks to an elderly patient at Tenon hospital, Paris, at the height of the heat wave
Credit: JEAN AYISSI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The number of deaths, first estimated to be 3000, then 5000, last week exceeded 10 000, according to statistics of the Pompes Funèbres Générales, a group of 352 undertakers who handle about a quarter of funerals in the country.
Extrapolating from their records, the undertakers' group estimates that the number of excess deaths during the month of August was 13 600.
On Sunday 24 August, 400 bodies still lay unclaimed in Paris alone. The medicolegal institute's morgue was full, and bodies were being stored in a refrigerated building of the food market in Rungis, near Paris, and in refrigerated trucks. The city extended the delay for burial from six to 10 days.
President Jacques Chirac, on his return from holiday in Canada, said on television last week that he deplored the situation of elderly people in France.
“Those over 60 are not well treated in our country,” he said. He recognised that there were deficiencies in the organisation of France's health services, and he promised to remedy the situation. “I have asked the government that the causes of the tragedy we have lived through be analysed in depth, with total transparency.”
President Chirac's government, meeting on the same day, announced that a surveillance and alert system specifically adapted for elderly people will be set up and that a committee of epidemiologists will evaluate the precise number of deaths attributable to the heat wave.
Another exercise will be to examine the conditions under which existing systems have functioned—and failed to function properly. Conditions of care for elderly people in private retirement homes are likely to be examined. The daily newspaper Le Figaro reported on 22 August that thousands of elderly people in the north of France choose to go to homes for the elderly in Belgium, where conditions are better and prices lower.
A major question, still unanswered, is why heat related deaths have been so much more numerous than in neighbouring countries. One factor, pointed out by demographer Henri Léridon of the French Institute of Demographic Studies, is that France has a large number of very old people, who are vulnerable to such a heat wave, which is exceptional in a generally temperate country. France has more than 10 000 people aged 100 or over.
According to Bernard Delanoë, mayor of Paris, 1474 deaths were recorded in Paris from 1 August to 18 August, more than twice the number during the same period in 2002. Last week the bodies of at least 40 elderly people not claimed by any relatives or social services were found in Parisian apartments.