Extreme heat is hard on the body. It can cause everything from confusion to seizures, not to mention serious discomfort. Add a blackout to an ongoing heat wave, so there’s no air conditioning, and things get worse.
TO study this week in the newspaper Environmental science and technology looked at the health effects when power grids fail during sustained heat waves. The findings are alarming: Patients would overwhelm hospitals in the cities of Atlanta, Phoenix and Detroit. In Phoenix, the authors write, more than half of the city’s residents would end up in the emergency room with heat-related illnesses, and in all three cities, deaths would more than double.
Among those affected, one group in particular is likely to suffer disproportionately in this type of crisis: pregnant women. With the rise in the earth’s temperature causing increasingly extreme heat waves, pregnant women face increased chances of premature delivery, stillbirth or low birth weight, especially in the last weeks of pregnancy. The risk is even increased for women of color. Black women specifically are twice as likely to have these negative outcomes as white women.
And the blackouts have been on the rise: Between 2011 and 2021 there were 84 percent more weather-related outages than in the previous decade, with grids overwhelmed by heavy electricity use during the summer months, according to Climate Central, a nonprofit research group of scientists.
The warming climate and the inability to cool down “could have important implications for children’s health,” said another study, this one in bmj, a journal published by the British Medical Association. Multiple researchers have found that preterm births increase 16 percent during heat waves.
“Really what we think is that with heat exposure, dehydration is really the main cause,” epidemiologist Rupa Basu. told NPR. “Dehydration causes hormonal changes, which gives a message to the mother for her to give birth. The blood flow in the uterus decreases.
Results of a 2010 study by Basu and colleagues found that in California, for every additional 10 degrees, the risk of preterm birth increased by 8 percent. He bmj The research found that “even seemingly minor decreases in birth weight could have a large impact on public health, as exposure to high temperatures is common and increasing.”
One problem that can be addressed is that doctors have not discussed the risks of high temperature in their pregnant patients. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said in 2021 that it “recognizes that climate change is an urgent health issue for women, as well as a significant public health challenge,” and recommended that doctors counsel patients about the dangers. environmental factors such as extreme heat during prenatal care visits.
“Special attention should be paid to the protection of pregnant people and newborns, in view of their increased vulnerability to climate change-related harm,” the doctors wrote in a statement. article 2022 in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The authors emphasized that “actions to reduce these effects must start now.” They noted that making preparedness and response planning a priority for public health agencies and the health system. As an example of early intervention, the doctors wrote that “ensuring that all pregnant patients, particularly those living in areas at high risk of extreme weather events, have access to their electronic medical records could support the transfer of prenatal care to an new location in the interrupt event”.
They also warned that more research is needed “on interventions that can alleviate the effects of climate change in these groups.”
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