E&E News/Politico, 4 September 2024

By vastly understating the number of heat-related deaths, medical officials make it harder to improve heat safety and save lives

Coroners ignore heat in many deaths. That’s dangerous.

Elidio Hernandez Gomez was unconscious by the time a friend drove him to Adventist Medical Center in Selma, California, in August 2023. Nurses started chest compressions and slid a tube down his throat to help him breathe, but it was too late.

Days later, the Fresno County Coroner said Gomez, 59, died of a heart attack due to plaque in his arteries and noted that Gomez fell ill picking tomatoes. The coroner’s report does not mention that on the day Gomez died it was 100 degrees outside, even though high temperatures are known to strain the heart and vascular system.

“I can’t recall that it came up,” said Thomas Bennett, the pathologist who performed the autopsy.

Federal records say that heat caused or contributed to at least 2,300 deaths in 2023. But the counts rely on death certificates filled out by coroners, medical examiners and other doctors, who often don’t consider heat’s potential lethality before certifying cause of death.

Read all here.

Read also: U.S. Deaths from Heat Are Dangerously Undercounted