French look for guilty source following death toll from heat

PARIS -- Shamed by thousands of deaths, France is trying to answer why so many elderly people succumbed to a heat wave, some alone in sweltering city apartments, others in overwhelmed hospitals.

Critics have blamed families for deserting aging relatives while they went on holiday. But a retirement home director who lost five of her residents and other health-care workers blamed the government for repeatedly cutting health-care budgets for the swelling ranks of the elderly.

Opposition leaders demanded an inquiry into what they said was the center-right government's intolerably slow reaction to the health crisis sparked by the heat wave.

On Tuesday, Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei ordered a swift report into what went wrong, a day after acknowledging as many as 5,000 people may have died in the heat -- almost twice as many as previously estimated.

While scorching heat cooked much of Europe this month, no other country has reported a death toll even close to France's. But in neighboring Spain and Germany, there have been suggestions that figures could soar as official numbers are tallied.

At the Protestant Retirement Home of La Muette in Paris, where five people died earlier this month when temperatures topped 104 degrees, some residents took their first strolls Tuesday in the garden, basking in 81-degree temperatures.

Posters still hung on the walls urging residents to drink plenty of water.

The home has only five caretakers for 88 residents, and during the heat wave, assistant director Anne-Sophie Tene said she worked 15-hour days, spoon-feeding water to residents. Many others were hooked up to IVs.

Even on normal days, "we're already running on a daily miracle," Tene said, accusing the government of slashing health- care budgets for the elderly for years.

Pascal Champvert, leader of an association of retirement home directors, complained the government had frozen $110 million of the $203 million initially allocated for retirement communities.

"We've got to put in place a real policy for the aged," Champvert told Europe-1 radio.

The government already is struggling to confront the needs of its aging population. Pension funds are dwindling as people live longer and the government plans to force people to retire later -- an issue that sparked massive protests last spring.

In 2000, one out of every five people in France was over age 60, according to the national statistics agency; projections show the figure will jump to more than one in three in 2050.

One hospital director suggested the heat wave brought attention to a deeper social problem -- that people simply forget the elderly in August, when France all but shuts down for vacation.

"The summer health crisis has underlined a new schism in society -- between those with air conditioning and those without, between those who go on vacation and those who are abandoned," Chantal de Singly, director of Paris' Saint-Antoine hospital, wrote in Le Monde newspaper.

"How could we have forgotten our neighbors?" she asked.

Meanwhile, other European countries have begun reevaluating their heat wave death tolls.

In Spain, where authorities said fewer than 50 people died of heat-related causes, news reports indicated the figure could run into the thousands.

Leading daily El Pais said the number of deaths was up by 18.8 percent in Madrid and 86.9 percent in the south-central city of Jaen in recent weeks. The report cited civil registry and municipal cemetery figures.

Officially, only 17 deaths in Germany have been blamed on the hot weather, but Dr. Gerd Jendritzky of the German Weather Service predicted that several hundred deaths will actually be attributed to the heat once statistics have been reviewed.

In Italy, the Health Ministry has refused to issue any official figures, arguing it is almost impossible to determine whether the weather was directly responsible.

However, the Italian daily La Repubblica said Monday heat-related deaths numbered at least 2,000. Many other Italian papers have published similar estimates, based on the total count of deaths in major Italian cities this year compared with the same period last year.