European countries recorded more than 10,000 excess deaths during the record-breaking heatwave that gripped the west of the continent in late June, official data show — the vast majority of them among the elderly.
More than 9,000 of the deaths were among people aged 65 and above, according to figures published by EuroMOMO, a mortality-monitoring network backed by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the World Health Organization. Extreme heat can kill through heat stroke or by aggravating cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, with older people among the most vulnerable.
“To have this kind of excess at this time of year is unusual. It’s really high,” Lasse Vestergaard, Chief Physician at Denmark’s Statens Serum Institut, which hosts EuroMOMO, told Reuters. “It is difficult to explain this high excess mortality by anything but the extreme heat.”
The data, pooled from national statistics across 27 European countries, counted all-cause excess deaths during the week of June 22–28, when the heatwave peaked in France, Spain, Britain and elsewhere. Deaths spiked to 10,650 that week, against a combined mortality that had been running around 500 below normal over the previous eight weeks. France and Belgium were the only countries to log “very high excess” mortality — Belgium’s worst during any heatwave in records dating to 2000.
A separate study published on Monday estimated 2,700 people died from heat-related causes in England and Wales alone during the May and June heatwaves. Scientists have said the late-June event would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change, which is making heatwaves more frequent and intense — a warning that resonates as Sri Lanka braces for El Niño-linked drought at home.
