More searing weather set to descend on city
Brace yourselves for another heat wave, Montreal.
Last week’s brutal heat wave is now linked to a total of 74 deaths, including 34 in Montreal, most of them elderly people living alone in sweltering apartments, and many with underlying health conditions.
Outside of Montreal, Quebec public health authorities provided a breakdown of heat-related deaths as follows: Quebec, three; Mauricie, eight; Eastern Townships, nine; Laval, five; Montérégie, nine; Lanaudière, one; and Laurentians, one.
Following a few days of cooler temperatures, another string of searing hot days is to begin next weekend, according to weather forecast reports.
David Kaiser, a physician with Montreal’s health department, said at risk are small children, the elderly, and those with health conditions who are often taking medications that affect their ability to recognize thirst, which means they cannot get rid of the accumulated heat in their bodies. “And after three or four days of heat, people’s coping mechanisms are just overwhelmed,” he said.
That’s a different scenario, for example, than a marathon runner whose body temperature jumps from 37 C to 42 C during an hour of exercise and suffers a deadly heat stroke, he said.
“If you can’t get out of the heat, that ends up being a big problem,” Kaiser said, especially for the atrisk fragile population. “Heat stress is often what tends to put them over the edge. They may have been doing fine with their heart disease and then you put four or five days of heat on that and their heart fails because the stress on the system is so important.”
Following the 106 deaths related to the 2010 Montreal heat wave, the province began keeping realtime tabs to be able to intervene more rapidly based on reports of “potential heat-related deaths” from a spike in ambulance calls and admissions to hospital emergency rooms. That’s when an emergency phase response is launched, for example, going door to door, and opening urban cooling stations with air conditioning.
The final death toll in 2010 was based on an in-depth evaluation of hospital charts, coroner’s reports and all other records currently not available in real time, he said. A similar report will be done at the end of this summer for the current heat wave, and only then will the two heat waves be compared.
Meanwhile, officials in Ontario, which had a similar heat wave, said that heat-related deaths are usually declared by the coroner.
However, the coroner does not investigate every heat-related death “as many of them don’t come to the attention of our office,” said Cheryl Mahyr, manager of the Ontario Chief Coroner’s office.
Generally, a reported death would be investigated when described as accidental, unnatural and/or sudden and unexpected.
“Deaths of persons (many of whom may be elderly) with one or more medical conditions that may make them more sensitive to the effects of hot weather, and perhaps lack of access to air conditioning, may never come to our attention as their deaths would be categorized as natural,” she said.
As far as Quebec health authorities are concerned, none of the deaths during the extreme heat wave occurred in a public long-term care nursing home, a centre d’hébergement et de soins de longue durée (CHSLD), or in a hospital.
However, staff and patients in some Montreal-area nursing facilities and hospitals have complained of suffocating conditions. Patients have been told to bring in their own fans and air conditioners. On Monday, in response to a health advocate calling for an independent investigation into any sudden deaths, an association of private nursing home owners said it was “horrified” by what it said was a scandal-in-the-making.
“It is indecent, misplaced and dangerous to suggest that CHSLDs are hiding deaths linked to the heat wave,” Annick Lavoie, head of the Association des établissements privés conventionnés, said in a statement.
The association accused patients rights advocate Paul Brunet, head of the Conseil pour la protection des malades, of attempting to create a scandal where there isn’t one.
But Brunet said he’s simply calling for an independent investigation into whether people died because of extreme heat in rooms without air conditioners.