which gvnt will kill more people US in Iraq or France w/heat

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epicstruggle

Passenger on Serenity
Veteran
Currently the French govermnent is getting blamend for about 3000 deaths. Many in france are mad that the govermnent responded too slow to the heat wave, taking over a week to have emergency services up and running.

I believe the US has killed about 3-5 thousand iraquis. My figure might be wrong, but thats what I last heard from cnn.

later,
epic
 
Why are so many people dying at these temperatures? 98-100 is NOTHING. Many parts of the US exceed this on a regular basis. Hell, I grew up in the Baltimore/DC area without air conditioning, and we regularly like clock work had 100+ temperatures in the summer, combined with agonizing humidity.


I think temperatures in the US have to reach about 108-110 before people start dropping from heat exhaustion.
 
Well you can figure that the previous administation in iraq killed a multitude more ppl.The vast majority of the ppl killed in iraq were soldiers who carried out the task of gassing kurds, and torturing their own ppl.

That many deaths for a heatwave that reached not even 100. I will work out doors all day if it is a 100, ( I live in the california desert, Bakersfield). Does it state why these ppl are dying?

Heat exhaustion? This baffles me. Do people really get that conditioned to weather? I moved from canada to here and it wasnt too bad.
 
DemoCoder wrote:
Why are so many people dying at these temperatures? 98-100 is NOTHING. Many parts of the US exceed this on a regular basis. Hell, I grew up in the Baltimore/DC area without air conditioning, and we regularly like clock work had 100+ temperatures in the summer, combined with agonizing humidity.
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IIRC the deaths that are blamed on the heat wave are mostly the elderly and sick, and don't have any air conditioning. Summer is usually around 75-80 degrees.
 
zurich said:
3000 people? :rolleyes:

Can we get a link for that heh?
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for the people who dont trust cnn:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3150097.stm
However, Dr Muriel Chaillet of the St Antoine hospital in Paris told BBC News Online that the situation could be blamed partly on an aging population but partly on the state of the health service.

"Last summer the situation was catastrophic and this year it is worse; we were not at all prepared. The hospital system is failing," she said.
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for those who trust cnn:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/08/15/paris.heatwave/index.html

for those who are paranoid:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3032073,00.html
If the government had acted sooner, ``many lives could have been saved,'' Patrick Pelloux, head of the association for French emergency hospital physicians, told Le Parisien newspaper.
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and for those who trust google above all else:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&edition=us&q=france+heat+wave+3000&btnG=Search+News

SO theres your sources. I guess you havent watched the news in the past 3 or 4 days, as this has been big news for europe. :)

later,
epic
 
DemoCoder said:
Why are so many people dying at these temperatures? 98-100 is NOTHING. Many parts of the US exceed this on a regular basis. Hell, I grew up in the Baltimore/DC area without air conditioning, and we regularly like clock work had 100+ temperatures in the summer, combined with agonizing humidity.


I think temperatures in the US have to reach about 108-110 before people start dropping from heat exhaustion.
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I think people do die of those temps in the U.S. But here, where the temperatures of 98-100 on a regular basis, we generally throw in heat related deaths with everything else. In France, which is not used to this, they are by and large simply judging numbers of deaths in relation to previous years. If the U.S. had a year or two similar to what Europe is used to, you would probably see a significant dropoff in similar deaths.
 
Dehydration deaths in the elderly arent accounted for the same everywhere. Its likely there are more deaths per capita in the us related to heat as its a much hotter country and more susceptible to serious heat waves but its not tabulated as caused by such.

Nice of you to think gov should be to blame for someone not buying into ac there epic. You sounded very socialist there for a minute :LOL: ...

J\K. France has a very temperate climate and no one expected this after generations of mild weather. Its a bit like asking Siberians to effect large investments in refrigeration or Sudanese in home heating...
 
pax said:
Nice of you to think gov should be to blame for someone not buying into ac there epic. You sounded very socialist there for a minute :LOL: ...
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Pax, IMO one of the main functions of govermnet should be to protect its vulnureable citizens from things that they cannot handle on their own. This being one of them.

Many (french) experts/proffesionals agreed with me, that the govermnent seriously failed to protect its most vulnurable citizens. Any of the three links i provided above will give you enough information. Also 2 of the quotes in the same post point out that the govermnent should have done more and sooner.

It seems like common sense to me. However what i think happened was that most of the govermnent was on vacation (more likely in a cooler place.) and just didnt care what was happening at home.

later,
epic
 
You are totally mistaken about theses deaths.

It s not like if people where perfectly fine and suddenly were falling dead due to very hot season.
It s a statistic result about older people dying sooner than expected due to theses temperatures. The rest is just politics, like if french were quoting and making fun of US government for power outages....
 
PatrickL said:
You are totally mistaken about theses deaths.

It s not like if people where perfectly fine and suddenly were falling dead due to very hot season.
It s a statistic result about older people dying sooner than expected due to theses temperatures. The rest is just politics, like if french were quoting and making fun of US government for power outages....
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I guess im wrong, i apologize. I thought i could believe Dr Muriel Chaillet, of the St Antoine hospital in Paris, and Patrick Pelloux, head of the association for French emergency hospital physicians. I thought they were good enough of a source. Not to mention the 3 different news sources that also came to the conclusion that the govermnent was to blame. But I guess your right. Sorry.

later,
 
PatrickL said:
...
The rest is just politics, like if french were quoting and making fun of US government for power outages....
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The power outages did not kill over 3000 people. I believe the injuries were 1 firefighter badly burned. And the casualties was one old person who had a heart attack after climbing about a dozen or so flights of stairs. Yeah the 2 sure seem similar.

later,
 
Epic the question is how many things can gov prevent if it only happens once in a century in such a country as France?

Its like an ice age starts tomorrow (it literally can start to happen in no time) and gov should have diesel generators in all nursing homes public and private?... Its not realistic and there was nothing the gov could do in short order do about this heat wave. Even a social democrat like me can recognize such things as much as I like gov intervention in society in things I think that are being neglected, I dont expect this level of intervention in these kinds of situations.

Of course when problems occur there will always be those who blame gov for not doing enough... I just dont happen to agree with the doctors who did complain here...
 
pax said:
Epic the question is how many things can gov prevent if it only happens once in a century in such a country as France?

Its like an ice age starts tomorrow (it literally can start to happen in no time) and gov should have diesel generators in all nursing homes public and private?... Its not realistic and there was nothing the gov could do in short order do about this heat wave. Even a social democrat like me can recognize such things as much as I like gov intervention in society in things I think that are being neglected, I dont expect this level of intervention in these kinds of situations.

Of course when problems occur there will always be those who blame gov for not doing enough... I just dont happen to agree with the doctors who did complain here...
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Actually they should have done something more than nothing at all. ;) What they eventually did after a week of people dropping dead, was open the military hospitals to the public and activate their emergency systems (created to handle terrorist acts). So if an act only happens once in a long while its not really worth preparing for. I guess the people who live near volcanoes really shouldnt prepare to evacuate since it the chances of happening are really low. People who live in flood planes (correct term?) shouldnt prepare for a flood emergency since it might be decades before a flood will effect them?

Seems like the govermnent had plenty of warning. Since the year before was also very hot. Read my post above for the quote.

later,
 
I dont think things like volcanoes are good comparisons... Its easy to evacuate around a volcano. Its not easy to intervene on a nationwide scale and try to see who needed help among the several millions who are old.

Ive read the articles in question. Preventing frail old people from dying when most of them were on their death beds to begin with makes no sense. Any more than feeding them intravenously or putting enough tubes in them to prolong their suffering... It wasnt that hot to begin with demo as stated... The modest heat wave could have been dealt with by people in their communities coming together to bring extra water and such to the elderly. In fact that kind of intervention did happen.
 
Well, a volcano is a fairly obvious treat, and floods too in many areas. To some extent I think there had been some preparations for the event of hot weather, but I'm not sure anyone ever expected it to be this hot and for this amount of time. It's like with snow in the winters here in Sweden. In the northern parts we are prepared and equipped to take care of snow very quickly. There's a snow storm? Well, the plough cars are already out there clearing the roads. It needs to be very severe before any major road doesn't get cleaned up within hours and all minor roads within a day. In the southern parts though they tend not to get that much snow, and consequently aren't equipped to handle huge amounts of snow. They have enough to take care of normal and above normal situations, but not extreme. It has happened a few times that it has fell large amounts of snow down there, with traffic chaos and even people freezing to death as a consequence. Up north we smile about this, cause their extreme situation is perfectly normal up here and noone here dies because of -40C unless they are drunk and decides to sleep in a pile of snow.
 
look pax, im not a doctor, i assume your not a doctor. So the doctors from france, who should know the situation better than us, say (paraphrasing) that they would not have had so many deaths had the govermnent helped out. Not by giving ac's to the people, but by opening the military hospitals to the public, or icing tents, or other things the govermnent should do.

later,
epic
 
PatrickL said:
And you are not french. I guess i am more in the know about what happened in my country than you :p
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But I can read what french doctors have said. :) they apparently disagree with you. ;) They felt that the govermnent could have done more (than nothing).

later,
 
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