Differing methods complicate counting deaths from heat

PHOENIX (AP) -- Postal worker Eugene Gates Jr. was delivering mail in the suffocating Dallas heat this summer when he collapsed in a homeowner's yard and was taken to a hospital, where he died.

Carla Gates said she's sure heat was a factor in her 66-year-old husband's death, even though she's still waiting for the autopsy report. When Eugene Gates died on June 20, the temperature was 98 degrees and the heat index, which also considers humidity, had soared over 110 degrees.

"I will believe this until the day I die, that it was heat-related," Carla Gates said.

Even when it seems obvious that extreme heat was a factor, death certificates don't always reflect the role it played.

Experts say a mishmash of ways more than 3,000 counties calculate heat deaths means we don't really know how many people die in the U.S. each year because of high temperatures.

That imprecision harms efforts to better protect people from extreme heat because officials who set policies and fund programs can't get the financial and other support needed to make a difference.

"Essentially, all heat related deaths are preventable. People don't need to die from the heat," said epidemiologist Kristie L. Ebi, who focuses on global warming's impact on human health as a professor at the University of Washington.

With a better count, she said, "you can start developing much better heat wave early warning systems and target people who are at higher risk and make sure that they're aware of these risks."

Currently, about the only consistency in counting heat deaths in the U.S. is that officials and climate specialists acknowledge fatalities are often grossly undercounted.

"Deaths are investigated in vastly different ways based on where a person died," said Dr. Greg Hess, the medical examiner for Pima County, Arizona's second most populous county and home to Tucson. "It should be no surprise that we don't have good nationwide data on heat-related deaths."

Many experts say a standard decades-old method known as counting excess deaths could better show how extreme heat harms people.

"You want to look at the number of people who would not have died during that time period and get a true sense of the magnitude of the impact," Ebi said, including people who would not have suffered a fatal heart attack or renal failure without the heat.