ecoyear

I'm still working on that first chapter of "Where there is no doctor", but meanwhile, something came up on The Oil Drum that caught my attention. It turns out that the UK is having extremely severe economic effects from the global financial meltdown and other reasons.  One huge concern this year is that many people will not be able to heat their homes.  Well it turns out there is already evidence that older people with heart disease die at higher rates during winter months. This is worse during colder winters. If many people find it hard to heat their drafty old British houses, this may translate to 10's of thousands of extra deaths.

Well, I'll be... how in 20 years of family practice, the topic of excess winter deaths from cardiovascular diseases had never come up.  Not in the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association, I don't think.  Even now googling excess winter deaths I come up with British articles.

Anyway, it may indeed be true that people die more in the winter, not only from pneumonia (which you would expect, as the germs are around more in the winter, and influenza can lead to pneumonia and death, for example), but also (in fact more so) from cardiovascular causes.

Turns out that excess winter mortality is not a huge problem in the US.  Maybe because much of the country does not have cold winters, and because the houses are not as drafty as in the UK, and because there is not tradition of suffering in the cold as there might be in Britain.  Anyway, I am hard at work trying to think up cheap low-tech strategies to minimize winter deaths in Britain.