Maui’s fires led a jump by 67 % in deaths. Most of them are not approved

“It can cause forest fires with measurable increase, at the population level in deaths, exceeding what was captured on the charges of official deaths,” said Michel Nakatsuka of the Faculty of Medicine in Grossman, the author participating in the article in the article in the article. The border in the climate. “This indicates that the real losses of the Lāhainā fire was broader than the concept previously.”

“It also indicates the need for prevention strategies that exceed the control of interactive wild fires,” Nakatsuka added. “As the original Hawaii, the first authors hope to focus the fire omission strategies on the views of Kānaka Maoli, including the restoration of traditional agricultural biological systems.”

Fire risk

Since the climate crisis makes forest fires more common and destroyed, understanding the full range of its influence is very important to alleviate this. To capture a wide range of potential deaths attributed to fires, the authors calculated the excessive death rate for all causes: this is the number of deaths that occurred during a certain period of what was expected. They trained a model on the demographic data from the Mawi Province from August 2018 to July 2023 and distributed the analysis to exclude the deaths caused by Covid-19.

“Forest fires can cause death in several ways,” said Dr. Kikwa Tabara of the University of California in Los Angeles. “In this case, recent reports indicate that many deaths were due to direct exposure, inhalation of smoke and burns. Others are likely to stem from healthcare disorders, such as the inability to reach critical medications or emergency treatment. Forest fires can also exacerbate the previous cases.”

The researchers found that in August 2023, 82 deaths were reported more than expected: the excessive death rate of 67 %. In August 19 week, the rate was 367 % higher than expected compared to previous years. 80 % of these deaths did not occur in a medical context, 12 % higher than other months, indicating that some people did not reach medical care due to fires. Meanwhile, the non -medical case of deaths increased from 68 % to 80 %.

This is slightly different from the official number of deaths of 102, although it is very close to the 88 deaths related to the fire mentioned by the Disease Control Center in August 2023.

“We believe this may reflect a temporary decrease in other causes of death, such as car accidents, during the fire period, similar to what we saw during Covid-19, when deaths decreased from some non-governmental causes during the lock,” Nakatsuka said. “It is also possible that some deaths occurred after the August Time window that we studied, for example of missed treatments or the exacerbation of chronic conditions.”

Scientists point out that there are some restrictions on this analysis. For example, the data is not geographically loved enough to determine whether the death toll is especially high in Lāhainā itself.

“Our study does not cover a short time window, so we cannot talk to the traces of death in the long run,” explained Nakatsuka. “Excessive deaths models cannot also determine the exact causes of death, and we were not able to access detailed death certificate data such as toxicology reports or autopsy

Future cultivation

To protect Hawaii from similar tragedies in the future, researchers call for improving the willingness of disasters and investing in the restoration of original Hawaiian plants and agricultural biological systems, which reduces the possibility of destroyed wild fires compared to modern mono cultures and types of gas plants.

“In the short term, it is very important for people who are exposed to forest fires to obtain immediate medical treatment,” said Nakatsuka. “Emergency emergency care can save lives.”

“In the long run, we would like to see more investment in politics in preventing wildfires rooted in environmental knowledge in the original Hawaii,” said Tabara. “This includes restoring traditional biological environment systems, removing non -original dry herbs, restoring traditional water systems before colonialism, and improving fire risk moderation to improve preparedness efforts.”