PARIS (Reuters) - the Minister for Health, Jean-François Mattei, estimated Monday that the assessment of 5.000 deaths related to the heat wave was a "plausible assumption".

"One evoked (Sunday) the figure of 5.000 (deaths). It is an assumption, it is plausible but that is only one assumption ", it declared on RTL (Luwembourg Radio and television). "We need to specify all that common by commune, to really know what it passed but naturally the figures will be very important", the minister underlined. Sunday, Jean-François Mattei had contradicted this semi-official estimate of 5.000 died, allotted to his services by the Newspaper of Sunday.

"We will not have the figures final and indisputable before several weeks because all the figures which were today advanced proceed of estimates", it added Monday morning.

"My services gave me an estimate, a high fork of 3.000 for the period from the 6 to August 12", but this figure is a "extrapolation which remains in spite of very specifying", according to Jean-François Mattei. The medical institute of day before currently carries out the analysis of approximately a thousand of cards concerning the deaths by hyperthermia on the whole of the territory. The first results should be known at the beginning of week.

In addition, medical alarm will not be raised to France "as long as the temperature will not be definitively with the fall because one does not exclude a rebound in the next days", confirmed the minister. "We are still on the state of emergency", insisted Jean-François Mattei, on the bolster for its management of the medical consequences of the heatwave...

[Edited on 18-8-2003 by Nans DESMICHELS]

Just imagine if somene blamed this heatwave on Osama Bin Laden,just like they said that the NY blackout was planned by terrorists,that claim had me in stiches for hours!

or shocked by heatwave, of all kind age in fact, and who may stay handicaped for life because of brain damages caused by heatwave and coma...

Small, but significant, consequences emerge in the French administration....

Unlike the bizarre non-reaction to 9/11 in the US, where those in the Bush administration responsible for National Security retain their jobs and their lying natures.

Anyway, that is trivial alongside the human tragedy in France, which I still can't quite fathom.




French Health Chief Resigns Over Heatwave Deaths
19/08/2003 02:41 PM
Thierry Leveque

The head of France's national health authority has resigned as the government conceded the number of deaths from the recent heatwave could rise to as high as 5,000.

"Lucien Abenhaim took the initiative of handing me his resignation...I accepted it," Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei said in a statement on Monday.

"I am now privately convinced that...we did not have the information or the warning signal that we should have had...I feel that as soon as we were alerted, we did what we had to do but I'm not sure we were alerted as early as was desirable."

Abenhaim rejected the accusation.

"Nobody can say that on the 10th (of August), there was no alert," he said on France 3 television. "When did the thousands of deaths occur? Afterwards. On the 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th... Why? Because of the exceptional rise in temperature."

"It wasn't the absence of an alert that created the epidemic. It was the heatwave," he told France Info radio. "The political controversy that is going on now and calling the health authority into question is totally unacceptable."