203 people died in the Canary Islands last summer from extreme heat

Between May 30th and September 4^th last year, 203 people died in the Canary Islands as a result of high temperatures or a heatwave. These figures have been published in an article called “Heat-related mortality in Europe during the summer of 2022”, published in Nature Medicine, which quantifies the mortalities attributable to heat in 35 European countries.

In total, there were 61,672 deaths last summer in Europe due to heat, of which 11,324 were in Spain, only second to Italy which had the most deaths. In total 823 regions were studied, including the Canary Islands, which had 203 deaths.

Last year there were officially two heatwaves in summer, according to AEMET data, both in July and both lasted for three days. 81 deaths were in Gran Canaria and 100 in Tenerife, with 90% of the heat-related deaths between the two islands.

The study also recorded 8 deaths in Lanzarote, 6 in La Palma, 5 in Fuerteventura, and 3 in La Gomera. There were no deaths In El Hierro attributable to heat in 2022.

"There is a lack of awareness that heat kills," says the president of the College of Physicians of Las Palmas, Pedro Cabrera. “Mortality in the Canary Islands is much lower than in mainland Spain, which is attributed to the fact that more people live in the north of the islands where it is cooler. If we all lived in the south we would have the same mortality.”

Cabrera explained that there are "two types of death from heat. 90% of them occur in vulnerable or risk populations, which are fundamentally the extreme ages of life: young children and the elderly. Then there are ‘chronic patients’, those with heart disease and COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). Others are the very obese, pregnant women, and normal people who are exposed to high temperatures after consuming alcohol or drugs. These categories account for 90% of heat-related deaths.”

The other 10% die from what is called "heat stroke." A ‘normal’ person who is subjected to excessive heat, like farmers (some have already died this summer in mainland Spain), suffers when the body reaches a temperature of 40.5°C as they start to have central nervous system dysfunction, dizziness, difficulty standing up, and speaking.

When a person is like this, it is a first-level medical emergency because heat stroke has three phases, and when you enter the second and third phases, the internal organs of the body begin to fail and mortality exceeds 50% of cases.