And $1.6 million in medical debt erased
Philadelphia officially recorded 118 heat-related deaths during the summer of 1993. Most of them were older people who lived alone.
Not everyone believed it. There was a lot of criticism and suspicion that it was an overcount. Nearby cities also experienced a heatwave, but didn’t have numbers like Philly. And if it was an accurate number, how could the city be that inept? Philadelphia’s medical examiner at the time, the late Haresh Mirchandani, expanded the definition of heat deaths to include those where heat was determined to be a contributing cause. In the past, the strict criterion to qualify as a heat-related death was hyperthermia, a core body temperature of 105 degrees at the time of death.Both NOAA and the Centers for Disease Control concluded that was Mirchandani was right and that his method should become the standard.
The city mobilized after the shock of the 1993 death toll and created a heat-response system. Chicago, Cincinnati, Dayton, and to have since adopted similar programs.
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