Heat Can Be Deadly: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Montreal's Heat Action Plan

Yesterday I posted a link to my feature on the cover of this month's issue of Environmental Health Perspectives. Within the issue you will find another article with my byline, one I wrote months ago that finally made it into the journal. (These news stories, called Science Selections in EHP, run in the same issue as the paper they're covering, so if the paper gets held up so does the article.) It's on a study evaluating the effectiveness of program developed in Montreal, Canada, to reduce health effects, particularly mortality, associated with extreme heat. Turns out the program was pretty effective in its early years. Another outcome of the study was the development of a novel method for evaluating the effectiveness of these sorts of public health programs, which are increasingly common worldwide with global average temperatures on the rise and extreme heat events increasingly common and severe. Read more here. And if you'd like to learn more about the health effects of heat (and cold, which, it turns out, is responsible for even more deaths than heat), check out my November 2015 feature on the subject.