PORTUGAL: A heatwave in Portugal has killed an estimated 1,316 people between late July and mid August, the health ministry said yesterday.
The heatwave was the hottest and longest recorded in Portugal and was part of a wider spell of extremely hot weather that gripped much of Europe.
The figures were from a preliminary report on the deaths, the health ministry said in a statement. The estimate is based on a comparison with the same period last year. The study "estimates that the increase in mortality related to the heatwave registered between the end of July and August 12th this year would be 1,316 deaths", the statement said.
The number of deaths was lower than from a 1981 heatwave and about the same as from one in 1991, the ministry said. The heatwave fanned Portugal's worst forest fires in more than 20 years, with an area almost the size of Luxembourg destroyed and 18 people killed in blazes.
Mr Manuel Costa Alves, chief assistant to the Institute of Meteorology, said the forest fires had at the time overshadowed the heatwave deaths. "I feared numbers of this order, which are catastrophic," he told TSF radio. He said Portugal needed to do more to protect its population, including providing better air conditioning for hospitals and homes for the elderly.