Decreased impacts of the 2003 heat waves on mortality in the Czech Republic: an improved response?

Abstract

The paper examines impacts on mortality of heat waves in 2003, the hottest summer on record in the Czech Republic, and compares them with previous similar events. While most summer heat waves over the period since 1986 were associated with significantly elevated mortality, this was not the case for three out of the four heat waves in 2003. The relatively weak mortality response was particularly noteworthy for the most severe heat wave which occurred in the first 10 days of August 2003 and resulted in enormous excess mortality in some western European countries. A mortality displacement effect and short-term adaptation to heat contributed to the reduced mortality impacts of the heat waves that followed after previous relatively warm periods. However, the decreased mortality response of the 2003 heat waves compared to previous heat waves in the 1990s is also likely to have arisen from positive health-care and other socio-economic changes in the post-communist central European region over the past decade, as well as a better public awareness of heat-related risks due to enhanced media coverage and regular biometeorological forecast and warnings.

The effects of the 1996–2012 summer heat events on human mortality in Slovakia

“…Kyselý, 2004;Hutter et al, 2007;Kyselý and Kříž, 2008;Matzarakis et al, 2011;Stanojević et al, 2014). The highest relative increases during the individual heat periods exceeded 20%, which is also similar to other Central European studies (Kyselý, 2004;Páldy et al, 2005).…”

“…Baseline daily mortality values were calculated based on the methodology used over a longer period of time in the biometeorological research in the Czech Republic (e.g. Kyselý, 2004;Kyselý and Kříž, 2008;Kyselý and Plavcová, 2012; the latest exact procedure is described in detail, for example, in the study by Hanzlíková et al, in press).…”

“…Total mortality 2.8 (-0.9 to 6.5) 11.0 (9.5 to 12.5) Male 1.6 (-3.4 to 6.7) 9.6 (7.6 to 11.7) For example, an excess total mortality of 2.9% during four heat waves was recorded in the Czech Republic (Kyselý and Kříž, 2008). In Prague, the increase during an extended heat peak period between the 2 nd and 22 nd of August was 3.2% (Knobová et al, 2014), in Vienna 5% for the entire summer (Hutter et al, 2007) and in Switzerland 6.9% for the entire summer (Grize et al, 2005).…”

“…Several contributions have focused on the population of the Czech Republic (e.g. Kyselý, 2004;Kyselý and Huth, 2004;Kyselý and Kříž, 2008;Kyselý and Plavcová, 2012;Knobová et al, 2014), as well as Austria (Hutter et al, 2007; Muthers et al, 2010a,b;Matzarakis et al, 2011), Switzerland (Grize et al, 2005), Poland (Kuchcik and Degórski, 2009), Hungary (Páldy et al, 2005; Bobvos, 2010, 2012), Croatia (Zaninović and Matzarakis, 2014), Serbia (Bogdanović et al, 2013; Stanovejić et al, 2014), and Moldova (Overcenco, 2010;Opopol et al, 2012;Corobov et al, 2013). In several cases, and this is also valid in global terms, most of the studies were aimed specifically at populations of larger cities or metropolitan areas where a higher risk of death can be generally expected due to a higher sensitivity of the population as a consequence of climate (urban heat island, higher air pollution, etc.)…”

A Neural Network model for the estimation of bioclimatic indexes

“…At this point, the gradient algorithm for back-propagation of the output layer error is applied until the first hidden layer, simultaneously updating the value of the weights, according to the deepest-descent gradient formula [4].…”