United States: Research shows that as temperatures rise in hot areas like Las Vegas and Los Angeles, more homeless people are dying. Between 2015 and 2022, there was a significant increase in deaths among homeless individuals in Clark County, Nevada (where Las Vegas is located or situated, and Los Angeles County, California. Experts warn that the number of deaths could increase even more because of climate change, according to Jonathan Jay, the senior author of the study.
As reported by the HealthDay, “It was significant to notice that people died more when temperatures rose from cool, to warm, and even more so, when the temperatures rose to hot temperature, particularly if above 90 degrees F,” said Jay, an assistant professor of community health sciences at Boston University.
“That’s hot, but it’s not even close to the hottest temperatures these cities experience,” he said in the news release from the university.
Jay and his colleagues analyzed numbers of deaths to homeless in Clark and Los Angeles County overall mortality rate for homeless and other causes, including high heat events such as heat stroke. This is true because exposure to high outside temperatures can aggravate other ailments.
They also evaluated the winter temperature mesostasis associated deaths.
Increased mortality was identified among the homeless when temperatures dropped below freezing but more deaths occurred on hottest days according to Jay and his team.
That was particularly so for homeless people in Las Vegas (Clark County), where death from extremely hot days was 25 percent of deaths per year.
In Los Angeles County, high heat days were found to contribute to 2.2% of annual mortality by the research.
The data was that the homeless are three times as likely to die in extreme heat if they do not have access to air-conditioned areas.
These observations were communicated recently in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
“It was not a shock that our team identified that heat increased mortality for homeless individuals, but the extent was unbelievable,” Jay added. ‘Our estimates are 10 to 100 times greater than the known associations between daily heat and mortality for the general population in LA and Las Vegas, and this discovery underlines the ethics of our systems to do so.’
There are some ways to shield the unhoused people from the extremes in the temperatures which includes the establishment of the cooling centers more shady green spaces and the water stations to help battle dehydration.
Of course, any state policy that raises the availability of stable housing for residents is also crucial the researchers said.
Unfortunately, “too much of our policy is driven by the impulse to hide homelessness from the view rather than to recognize people’s dignity and protect their health and improve our system Jay said. “The idea that policing is the key to the solving this problem which tends to be false and it’s a miscalculation we make over and over again as a society.