August 24, 2024

From around March to June this year, several thousand people in India died and several hundred thousand more fell ill from a heat wave, according to independent public health experts. For several days, peak temperatures soared over 50* (122*F) in many parts of the country, especially in the north. The heat wave was the most severe and one of the longest recorded.  

While the extreme 2024 heat wave in India was widely covered by the media in India and around the globe, the country has faced the problem for decades. “In India, with the world’s largest population, heatwaves occur annually,” notes a study published in ScienceDirect.

Exposure to extreme heat causes mortality and illness through numerous ways including toxicity, inflammatory response, and coagulation as well as by damaging the brain, heart, intestines, kidneys, liver, lungs, and pancreas.

While severe heatwaves, as in 2024, cause more immediate deaths, the relatively milder ones claim more lives over time as they are more common, according to Tirthankar Banerjee, a climate researcher at Banaras Hindu University, India.

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