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More than 10,000 people died across Europe during an eight-day heatwave that swept the continent in late June, according to a report released on Sunday by EuroMOMO, the European mortality monitoring network.
The report said the intense heat between June 20 and June 28 caused the deaths across the 27 European Union (EU) member states. Nearly 9,000 of the victims were aged 65 or older.
EuroMOMO, which monitors mortality trends in Europe in collaboration with the EU and the World Health Organization (WHO), said most of the victims died from heatstroke or heat-related cardiovascular and respiratory failure.
“There is no other explanation. These deaths were caused by the extreme heat generated by the heatwave,” Lasse Vestergaard, a senior official at EuroMOMO and chief physician at Denmark’s Statens Serum Institut, told Reuters.
“The death toll is exceptionally high, and such a large number of deaths within such a short period at this time of year is highly unusual,” he said.
While the report did not provide a country-by-country breakdown, it said France and Belgium accounted for a significant share of the deaths.
Official data show that several EU countries have collectively recorded an average of around 500 heat-related deaths per week over the past eight weeks.
According to records from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), Europe’s highest weekly death toll was recorded during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, when more than 1,650 deaths were reported in a single week in May–June 2020.
European scientists said the late-June heatwave was driven by human-induced climate change and warned that similar extreme heat events are likely to become more frequent in the coming years.
Source: Reuters
