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Zara Huge covers climate at Bloomberg and she recently had the opportunity to take a trip to one of the hottest places in the world. And I took an elevator and upstairs in a university building.
Elevator comes out in a corner and if you turn left in Canada, there's this long, tall hallway.
And all along that hallway is one of the world's largest research facilities dedicated to studying the effects of heat on the human body.
And we kind of just spent the day walking through opening door number one, door number two, door number three.
Behind each one, there were people doing all kinds of tests.
How's that it off?
It's okay.
People like Janet Spencer.
She's seventy five years old. She describes herself as a vet her in of the lab. She's retired. Specifically, she's a retired mediator for Canada's Human Rights Commission.
I never imagined did that be a guinea pig for size?
What temperature are we at? We're at thirty six degrees.
So pretty warm for sure. Janet was doing what's called a passive trial, where she was just sort of hanging out in the heat. These can be full days. In March, she was there for three days straight, which meant she was sleeping in the room, and she described it as watching a ton of Netflix.
When Zara met Janet, she'd only been in the lab for an hour, but she was already feeling the effects.
When I started, I brought my paper to read, and I managed to read that in the first half hour. But right now, pretty much all I'm capable of is playing mindless solitary games.
Help down the hall. Bob Striker was doing a very different kind of experiment.
And how do you feel right now since I just saw you walking on the chunnel.
For a while in the heat.
I'm tired, hunted.
And in another room, Lutz Suckstorf was recovering from a cycling test.
Mentally, it really starts to drain you like it. Really it becomes an effort, you know, literally that one foot in front of the other. If we had another half an hour, forty five minutes, my bloody would have started to saying, no, this is no fun anymore.
When Janet, Bob and Lutz spoke with Zara, that kept the mood light, but their motivations for participating in this research, and the goals of the research itself are very serious. Nearly half a million people die every year as a result of extreme heat, according to research compiled by the reinsurance company Swiss Ree. That's more than the total from hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods combined, and Zara says the real number is likely even higher.
Often we're just maybe tracking the most extreme cases that are coming through hospitals. But you know, if you're dying from a heart problem that was tied to the heat, that might not necessarily be recorded as a heat death. So you know, it is a really big number that we don't even have a full grasp on.
I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News Today. On the show, the researchers on the forefront of the latest science on deadly heat, why everyone's at more risk than they think, and what actually works
to mitigate those risks. The Heat Lab at the University of Ottawa, the Human and Environmental Physiology Research Unit, has been around since two thousand and Over the last two decades, the lab has been at the forefront of studying human's ability to live and work in the heat.
A lot of the work that I am doing is really focused on understanding the impacts of heat exposure on the health well being of the general public and markers.
The man in charge is doctor Glenn Kenny. He's been studying the effects of heat on the human body for thirty five years and he says, in many ways, this is an old problem.
When we think about, for example, workers, and we think about the impacts that heat has, this is not new. This is something we've known for decades.
But as the climate changes, heat is only growing more extreme.
It was only a couple of years ago, in twenty twenty one that the Western Heat Dome, which was this really deadly heat wave hit the western part of Canada, also the western part of the US, but in Western Canada,
like over six hundred people died. A lot of them were elderly, and a lot of them that were people living in their home who didn't have air conditioning and they're basically cooking in their homes, and people didn't have a way to kind of check in on them, and unfortunately a lot of them didn't realize they were too uncomfortably hot until it was too late because of their
impered ability to sense it. Kenny says, to keep people safe, you need to understand how heat affects different kinds of bodies. He says that older heat guidelines have typically been based on research focused on young, healthy people who've had limited heat exposures, think a couple of hours at a time. That's where his test subjects come in. Kenny and his team use specialized equipment to measure how extreme heat can affect body temperature in simulated real world conditions.
We have an apartment styled chamber where we have a bag, where we have a kitchen, a washroom, where we can bring in the patient and have them live within that chamber so that we can understand what happens to them and monitor them not only during the daytime, but also what is the impact all that heat exposure on sleep.
Kenny also has another secret weapon, a one of a kind air calorimeter, which is lab uses to measure the amount of heat released from or absorbed in the body.
So we did that before and after the three day exposure, so we can see if there's a decrease in my capacity to space, So is that exposure also causing deterioration in my ability through will regulate?
But that's not the only data the lab is collecting. The team keeps close tabs on participants cognitive and physical performance, and records detailed updates on their temperatures.
These are actually pretty uncomfortable trials. I mean, the more I was learning about it and talking with people, I'm like, I'm not sure I would want to do this. They do a lot of tracking of your temperature, and we may think, oh, you can take their skin temperatures right when you go to the hospital or the doctor and they check to see if you have a fever. But that's really not the best way to get a gauge
of how hot your insights are. That's called a skin temperature, but it's better to get a core temperature, and there are a couple different ways they can do that, including putting something down your esophagus, which is like really intrusive, but also the more common is like a rectal pro and that was tracking their core temperature that she was sort of wearing on a fanny pack.
Armed with the data from these experiments, Kenny's lab has been assessing whether the upper limit for a safe indoor temperature recommended by some Canadian officials twenty six degrees celsius or just under seventy nine degrees fahrenheit is actually safe, and they've found that for a day, it seems to be. What they're trying to figure out now is how the body responds to those temperatures over longer periods of time.
When you are exposed to temperatures above twenty six degrees celsius, older adults and individuals with chronic diseases are going to start seeing increases in their level of physiological strength. But I want you to imagine that increase in temperature is a strain. Go out and exercise and keep that stress. Now, that's a stress, and that stress is essentially maintained over time. That person is going overheat. If that heat wave stays and overheating is consistent, that strain will remain.
So in a warming world, how can people reduce the strains that come with extreme heat? And are all cooling options created equal? That's after the break. Here in New York where I am, when a heat wave hits, the city opens up public cooling centers. But doctor Glenn Kenny, who runs one of the world's largest heat labs at the University of Ottawa, says cooling centers alone don't totally protect against the risks of extreme heat.
The problem is, upon re entering to the heat, you haven't removed all that heat from the body. Air is not a good conductor of heat unlike water, right, so one of the things upon reenter the heat, the bible actually warmed up very quickly. So the challenge is is that that person feels very well, They feel more relaxed, they feel cooler. Problem is, within a couple hours their body heats up very fast and get as hot as their non cool counterpart. So imagine they're gonna they may
not adjust their behavior because essentially they feel better. So the problem is is feeling better actually masks the risk that they face because their temperatures are equally as.
High Bloomberg Zara here Ge, says Another researcher, this one at the University of Sydney, who did his post doc at Kenny's lab, looked at the efficacy of fans and how they could be used in Bangladeshi garment factories, where workers face especially hot and humid conditions.
Every part of the world, heat is a combination of high temperatures and humidity, So in a place like Bangladesh, you can have much higher humidity than you might in some other places, and so that's a key thing to understand, and the type of solution that you then have to keep people cool can be different. So you know, when we're looking, for example, at electric fans, like how effective
are they as compared to air conditioning. Air Conditioning is always going to be the best, but not everybody has access to that, right, especially across the developing world. So a key part of cooling is not just sweating, but then that sweat be able to cool or to dry off. It's that drying piece that is essential. If you're just sweating and sweating and sweating, you are going to keep overheating and so you need it to continually be drying
to be it effective. And so that's one thing where a fan in a particularly human environment might be helpful because it can help kind of encourage sweating to have that maximum potential.
But it's worth noting fans also come with risks. In extremely hot and dry climates, fans can actually heat people up faster, and like cooling centers, Kenny says, us fans can give people a false sense of security. They can make you feel better while you're using them. So good that you may feel well enough to go back out in the heat.
But what's important here is it doesn't reduce the strain on the body. It makes you feel better, that again mass the potential dangers that you might experience because you're not able to sense the fact that you are probably going to be overheated, or you are overheated, you're.
Understrainth The United Nations has used Kenny's research to inform its worker safety recommendations, and Zara says it's not just governments that are taking notice. Companies like smart Cone are too. They make devices and wearables to monitor the temperature on job sites.
One of the clients they're currently working with is United the airline company, which is told me how they are testing out smart Cones wearable device which helps monitor heat exposure and worker exerts at employees working on the tarmac and on the ground at Phoenix Airport. So this is still.
Early days, egg frying on the tarmac condition right, probably right, but real world example of how this is playing out. Zara says that when she asks heat researchers about the next big questions in their field, their answers usually fall into two camps.
The first was what are the most practical takeaways we can get in the applications of this work to really help best improve people's safety today. And then it's what's going to happen in the future. How do we understand how hot is it actually going to get? And then what does that mean for people's health. Part of the interesting research that's going on is trying to understand that, and it really is a whole bunch of unknowns and
really like we don't know what is the limit. I feel like that's a lot of what this work is trying to figure out.
This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. The show is hosted by Me, David Gera, Juan ha and Seleiah Mosen. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox, Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Patti Hirsch, Rachel Lewis, Krisky, Naomi un, Julia Press, Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Suguiera, Julia Weaver, Yang Yong, and Taka Yasuzawa. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg dot Com, subscribe today at Bloomberg dot com. Slash
podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back on Monday.