India is experiencing increasingly frequent and severe heat waves, a trend that public health experts and scientists believe the country is ill-equipped to handle, especially given its large population and many vulnerable, impoverished citizens. A major obstacle to addressing the issue is the difficulty in accurately counting heat-related deaths.
The problem begins with how heat deaths are classified. While heat-related deaths occur when the body overheats due to high ambient temperatures and humidity, many also happen when pre-existing illnesses make individuals more susceptible to extreme heat.
However, most government doctors adhere to a narrow definition, focusing only on immediate causes like heat stroke. Government guidelines do exist for classifying deaths as heat-related, requiring consideration of high ambient temperatures and circumstances even if body temperature was reduced by cooling efforts.
However, these investigative autopsy procedures place a significant time burden on India's already strained medical system. Overworked doctors in public hospitals are often not adequately trained to determine the cause of death, and private hospitals do not consistently record deaths as heat-related, meaning only a small percentage of actual heat-related deaths are accurately diagnosed and reported.
Discrepancies in counting methods between different government agencies further complicate the issue. For instance, news reports often tally far more heat-related deaths than official government figures.
This disparity highlights that the officially reported numbers do not reflect the true scale of the problem in India.
