Impact of heat waves on sex specific mortality in Novi Sad

Abstract

© 2019 Author(s). Raising awareness on climate change resulted in climate scenarios characterized by more prolonged, frequent and intense periods of exceptionally hot weather. These periods, heat waves, have numerous consequences: raised energy costs, more frequent wildfires and droughts, damage to crops, heat stress to livestock and as especially concerning - heat related mortality in humans. Unable to cool itself effectively, human body easily succumbs to prolonged and intense heat stress. On average, in Europe, Australia and United States heat waves kill more humans than any other natural hazard. Yet, heat waves resist all-encompassing and widely accepted definition, consequences of which are myriads of models for calculating heat waves. Majority of these methods employ concomitant observation of temperature and humidity data in the range of a few consecutive days to see if they exceed certain percentiles for the specific location and habitat. In order to clarify impact of heat wave periods on mortality, we performed regression analysis for the city of Novi Sad. Heat wave duration index, HWDI, was calculated for warm season months. Mortality data were obtained from Serbian bureau of statistics for the period 1994 - 2000. For each observation we used total and sex-specific monthly mortality as dependent variable and existence of heat wave in observed month as categorical independent variable. Negative binomial regression analysis was carried out using MASS package in R programming language. In heat wave/non heat wave analysis, significant impact of heat waves on total female mortality [risk ratio RR=1.14; p<0.05] and total mortality [RR=1.08; p<0.05] was found.