Cold weather kills 20 times more people than hot
Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings, published in The Lancet, also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells.
"It's often assumed that extreme weather causes the majority of deaths, with most previous research focusing on the effects of extreme heat waves," says lead author Dr Antonio Gasparrini from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK. "Our findings, from an analysis of the largest dataset of temperature-related deaths ever collected, show that the majority of these deaths actually happen on moderately hot and cold days, with most deaths caused by moderately cold temperatures."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.htm
= new reply since forum marked as read
Last edited Mon May 25, 2015, 11:34 PM - Edit history (1)
Extreme Cold seems to have NO affect on death rates, but extreme heat does, but most people died during more moderate temperatures and cold seems to be a bigger factor when comparing MODERATE temperatures. i.e. people tend to be active when temperatures are around Freezing and thus more people die at that temperature then when temperatures are below Freezing or when temperatures are hotter.
As to hot temperatures being a killer, most people stop doing things before the heat kills them, thus less people die do to HIGH temperature. When people die is when they are ACTIVE not when they are laying around for the temperature to go up or down. The following charts shows the huge increase in deaths as temperatures go above 20-25 degrees Celsius (68 to 77 degree Fahrenheit). 30 to 40 degree Celsius (86 to 104 Fahrenheit) seems to be a real killer.
Please note, areas NOT known for real cold temperatures have they greatest loss of life during cold snaps (See Sydney, San Paulo, Rome, Madrid, but areas know to be cold, cold temperatures death tends to be low, see Stockholm, Toronto, New York City).
In more "Moderate Areas" of temperatures, Seoul, Tokyo. Beijing, Cold temperatures kill a lot more people then hot temperatures, but the affect of cold is over a huge range of temperatures, while the effect of heat 25-40 degrees Celsius (86-104 Fahrenheit).
London is a outer, i.e huge cold deaths huge heat deaths. Temperature below freezing kills people, temperatures above 20 degree Celsius kills people.
Bangkok is another outer, but it is the only true "Tropical" city in the list (San Paulo is on the Tropic of Capricorn and Taipei is just north of the Tropic of Cancer, so like South Texas and the Everglades, not quite in the Tropics,). Bangkok is has high death rates due to cold and heat, but not that much more then normal. i
Our findings show that temperature is responsible for advancing a substantial fraction of deaths, corresponding to 7·71% of mortality in the selected countries within the study period. Most of this mortality burden was caused by days colder than the optimum temperature (7·29%), compared with days warmer than the optimum temperature (0·42%). Furthermore, most deaths were caused by exposure to moderately hot and cold temperatures, and the contribution of extreme days was comparatively low, despite increased RRs. The study was based on the largest dataset ever collected to assess temperature–health associations, and included more than 74 million deaths from 13 countries (panel). The analysis of data from 384 locations provides evidence for temperature-related mortality risk in a wide range of climates and populations with different demographic, socioeconomic, and infrastructural characteristics. A strength of the study was the application of new, flexible statistical models to characterise the temperature-mortality association and pool estimates across locations. In particular, while previous studies relied on simplification of the exposure-response or lag structure, the approach we used here enabled us to estimate and pool non-linear and delayed dependencies and to identify the temperature of minimum mortality.