For eight days in late June, Karachi, Pakistan’s big southern port city, was hit by a blistering heatwave combined with unprecedented humidity, with temperatures consistently topping 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and not relieving even at night. “It feels like we’re living in an oven,” said Ruqqaya Bibi, a working-class resident.
Hospitals were overwhelmed by the influx of patients suffering from sunstroke and severe dehydration. “We have many more patients than usual with high fever, restlessness, vomiting and diarrhea,” said Shaguta Ismail, a nurse at the Dr Ruth K. M. Pfau Civil Hospital, the megacity’s public facility.
In Karachi, at least 49 people have died from the heat in a 10-day period, according to a provincial authorities report on Tuesday, July 2. In fact, Karachi’s heatwave likely claimed hundreds of lives in just a week. “Our morgue usually receives 25-30 bodies every day,” said Faisal Edhi, director of the Edhi Foundation, which manages the morgue and ambulance. “Between June 21 and 27, this number jumped to 830.”
The rise in temperatures coincided with the peak of a heatwave that hit many other parts of the country before hitting Karachi. At the end of May, temperatures topped 52 degrees Celsius in the ancient city of Mohenjo Daro, a key site of the Indus Valley civilisation.
The extreme heatwave also hit neighbouring northern India. In New Delhi, temperatures soared dangerously close to 50 degrees, cooling residents and threatening their lives. On June 1, 33 election officials in Uttar Pradesh died of heatstroke. A few days earlier, a heatwave in Bihar killed 14 people in a 24-hour period. Thousands were hospitalised. “High temperature has a devastating effect on the body. Heatstroke is the final stage and there are various forms of heatstroke,” warned Amrendu Yadav, professor at Dr Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in New Delhi.
“Lowering body temperature”
With climate change threatening to increase such extreme heat, a public facility in India’s capital opened a unit in mid-May to treat patients with severe heatstroke. Admitted patients are immediately immersed in ceramic tubs filled with ice. “Most patients arrive here unconscious, vomiting and in convulsions, so we have to do everything we can to lower their temperature as quickly as possible and avoid vital organ failure,” Prof Yadav explained. Mortality from severe heatstroke is 80 percent, but prompt treatment can reduce that to 10 percent.
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