Helene has killed at least 162 people in the South-east so far. That could be the start of a lot of lives and damage from the storm, which is sad.
Hurricanes and tropical storms kill many more people than first reported. A new study released on Wednesday says this.
The study found that an average U.S. tropical cyclone indirectly kills 7,000 to 11,000 more people than the reported dozens or hundreds of deaths caused by storms. Scientists say that between 3.6 million and 5.2 million people have died in the U.S. because of tropical storms since 1930.
The study shows that those extra deaths happen because of things that happened after the event.
Overall, the number of deaths caused by tropical cyclones may be a bigger public health problem than was thought before. This is because disasters often set off a chain reaction of other threats to the people who are impacted.
Researchers think that tropical storms are responsible for 25% of deaths in babies and 15% of deaths in people ages 1 to 44 in the U.S.
How do tropical cyclones cause the excess deaths?
What the researchers found was that these extra deaths were caused by diabetes, suicide, SIDS, or some other reason that wasn’t recorded. Heart disease and stroke were the next most common causes, followed by cancer.
The number of people killed in these storms is the only thing that the government keeps track of. Official figures say that 24 people die directly during storms. The study says that most of these deaths are caused by drowning or some other type of trauma.
“People are dying earlier than they would have if the storm hadn’t hit their neighbourhood,” said Solomon Hsiang, a professor of environmental and social sciences at Stanford University and the lead author of the study.
“Watching what’s happened here makes you think that this is going to be a decade of hardship on tap, not just what’s happening over the next couple of weeks,” Hsiang told the Associated Press. Looking at the death and damage caused by Helen.
How was the study done?
The study used statistics to look at information from the 501 tropical storms that hit the Atlantic and Gulf coasts between 1930 and 2015, as well as death rates for different groups of people in each state right before and after each cyclone.
“After each storm, there is this surge of extra deaths in a state that has been affected that has not been previously documented or linked to hurricanes in any way,” Hsiang told the AP.
A statement from the university says that researchers also found that the long, slow rise in deaths from cyclones tends to be much higher in places that have had fewer storms in the past.
“No one on the ground knew they should be preparing for this because this long-term effect on mortality has never been documented before,” said Rachel Young, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and the study’s lead author. “Nobody in the medical community has planned a response.”
Burden higher for some groups
The study found that tropical storms are responsible for more than three out of every hundred deaths in the United States. However, the toll is much higher for some groups. For example, black people are three times more likely to die after a hurricane than white people.
The study says that this finding gives a clear number to the worries that many Black communities have had for years about the unfair treatment and experiences they have after natural disasters.
The study came out Wednesday in the British magazine Nature, which is reviewed by experts in the field.
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