Health
Northern India Endures a Heat Wave, and a Wave of Deaths
An unusually intense heat wave has swept across northern India in the last four days, with some hospitals in the state of Uttar Pradesh recording a higher-than-usual number of deaths. Doctors there are convinced there’s a link between the punishing temperatures and the deaths of their patients, but officials are investigating what role the dangerous combination of heat and humidity played in the rise in mortality.
In Ballia District, population about three million, the daily high temperature over the same period has hovered around 43 degrees Celsius (above 109 degrees Fahrenheit), nine degrees hotter than usual, alongside relative humidity as high as 53 percent. Dozens of deaths were recorded at hospitals there on June 15, 16 and 17.
Dr. Jayant Kumar, the chief medical officer of Ballia District, near the state of Bihar, said that 23 people died in the district on Thursday. The next day, 11 more succumbed. “The number of deaths has been more than normal,” Dr. Kumar said.
He told the Press Trust of India, a news agency, that on average, eight people usually die per day. “Most of these are natural deaths,” he told The Times in a phone interview, “most of the dead being elderly people suffering from different ailments like diabetes.”
But Indian government officials have pushed back against linking the deaths too directly to the punishing heat.
Dr. Diwakar Singh, formerly the chief medical superintendent of Ballia District, told reporters on Friday night that 34 people had died of heat stroke at the main hospital under his oversight. The next day, he was reprimanded by the state government for prematurely drawing that conclusion and removed from his position.
The government has since sent a scientific team from the state capital, Lucknow, to investigate the causes.
Dr. Singh’s replacement, Dr. S.K. Yadav, took a more cautious line on Sunday, saying, “Elderly patients with comorbidities like hypertension and diabetes are expiring because of heat.”
“Still,” he added in a phone interview, “the death numbers are more than normal.” He agreed with Dr. Kumar’s assessment that the excessive heat was to blame for the high death toll, whatever the exact link.
While an extraordinary number of patients were being admitted for heat-related distress, Dr. Yadav said, “we are able to provide beds to all the patients, and we have enough doctors and medicines.”
The nightmarish prospect of mass deaths caused by a sudden rise in temperatures has become more urgent in recent years. And the phenomenon in this area of the world may portend a warning beyond India’s borders.
The heat in this part of India has been hovering around the critical “wet-bulb temperature,” the threshold beyond which the human body cannot cool itself to a survivable point by perspiration, defined as 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit), adjusted for 100 percent humidity. The wet-bulb reading in Ballia on Saturday reached 34.15 degrees Celsius (about 93 degrees Fahrenheit).
It is expected that more older or infirm patients than usual will die in heat waves like this one, which climate change has made more common across India’s historically scorching plains, as in most of the world, scientists say.
The question is whether these are “excess deaths,” of the kind that can be measured only statistically, or whether India’s incrementally more unbearable weather is playing a more direct role in causing them, for instance by heat stroke. When more deaths are recorded than were expected, they count as excess. But that leaves open the question of what exactly caused them.
Local newspapers, collecting figures from different officials and hospitals, have counted as many as 54 deaths in Ballia and an additional 44 in Bihar over the past three days.
In April, when temperatures in the western state of Maharashtra were nearing their peak, at least 11 people are known to have died of heat stroke almost simultaneously.
An especially humid city like Kolkata now crosses the anticipated limit of human survivability to heat with only perspration for cooling several times a year; some epidemiologists are puzzled that more Indians do not drop dead of heat.
The fact that wet-bulb temperatures in much of South Asia have been inching nearer to the critical level has provoked global concern over the past few years. It has even made its way into literature. “The Ministry for the Future,” a science-fiction novel written by Kim Stanley Robinson in 2020, imagines a scenario in which 20 million Indian citizens living in the same part of the country — men, women and children — are killed by an intense heat wave within one week, immediately changing the course of history.
The region’s hottest weather breaks in June every year. A cyclonic storm, the Indian Ocean equivalent of a hurricane, pushed through India’s western coast late last week, and its rains are expected to arrive in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar within the next two days. That should bring temperatures down from their highest level. Soon after, the region can expect the annual monsoon.
The diagnosis by the medical team from Lucknow that is analyzing last week’s excess deaths may not mention heat stroke. In that case, it will most likely describe a situation like the deadly heat wave that hit Chicago in July 1995, which was blamed for killing 700 people, or the one that caused tens of thousands of deaths in Europe in August 2003.
What is not in doubt is that weather of the kind that is becoming increasingly commonplace on every continent is making greater numbers of people die sooner than they would have in cooler times.
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Ivanka Trump, the daughter of incoming President Donald Trump, has been known to lead an active life.
As the mother of three kids and a lover of outdoor sports, the 43-year-old is always on the move, recently adding jiu-jitsu to her mix of physical activity.
In a recent appearance on The Skinny Confidential Him & Her podcast, Trump shared how her daughter, Arabella, expressed interest in learning self-defense when she was 11.
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“I’m just so in awe of [her],” Trump said about her daughter. “She came to me and said, ‘As a woman, I feel like I need to know how to defend myself, and I don’t have a confidence level yet that I can do that.’”
Ivanka Trump plays with her daughter, Arabella Rose Kushner, in the Rose Garden during a Congressional Picnic on the South Lawn of the White House in June 2017. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Trump responded, “At 11 … I was not thinking about how to physically defend myself, and I thought it was the coolest thing.”
After researching self-defense options, Trump enrolled Arabella, now 13, in jiu-jitsu (martial arts) classes with the Valente Brothers in Miami, Florida – and soon the whole family joined in.
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“[Arabella] started asking me to join – I joined,” she said. “Then my two sons wanted to do what their older sister was doing. Then my husband joined … It is good for everyone.”
“It’s almost like a moving meditation.”
Trump, who is now a blue belt in jiu-jitsu, described that she likes how the sport “meshes physical movement.”
“It’s almost like a moving meditation because the movements are so micro,” she said. “It’s like three-dimensional chess.”
“There’s like a real spiritualism to it … The grounding in sort of samurai tradition and culture and wisdom.”
During President Trump’s first term in the White House, Ivanka Trump noted that she had very little focus on fitness, only taking weekly runs with husband Jared Kushner and “chasing the kids around the house.”
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Trump shared that she was “never a gym person,” but always loved sports, which still holds true today.
She said she enjoys skiing, surfing and racquet sports like padel tennis (a hybrid of tennis and squash) and pickle ball, which she described as “fun and social.”
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are seen out for a walk with their children on Dec. 10, 2022, in Miami, Florida. (MEGA/GC Images)
‘Elevating awareness’
On the podcast, Trump said she was drawn to jiu-jitsu because it combines physical fitness and philosophy.
It also focuses more on how to extract yourself from a dangerous situation before having to harm someone who’s a threat, she noted.
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“Having these skills makes you less likely to get into a fight, not more likely to,” Trump went on.
“Once you have the confidence that you can sort of move out of a situation, there’s a real focus on elevating awareness.”
Ivanka Trump waves as she arrives at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland for US President Donald Trump’s departure on Jan. 20, 2021. (ALEX EDELMAN/AFP via Getty Images)
In a previous interview with Fox News Digital, Rener Gracie, head instructor of jiu-jitsu at Gracie University in California, stressed that the only truly reliable skills are those that have been “mastered into muscle memory.”
This occurs through extensively practicing self-defense methods like Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which are “leverage-based and don’t rely on you having a physical advantage over the subject,” he noted.
“Having these skills makes you less likely to get into a fight, not more likely to.”
“And by that, I mean strength, speed, power and size — because in almost every case, the attacker is going to target someone who they feel is physically inferior to them.”
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Gracie, whose family created Brazilian jiu-jitsu and the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship), shared that jiu-jitsu is “highly sought after” because it only takes weeks or months for someone to “develop the core skills that could keep them safe in a violent physical encounter.”
‘Transformative’ strength training
In addition to mastering self-defense skills, Ivanka Trump recently revealed a shift in her fitness routine to include weightlifting and resistance training.
On Instagram, Trump posted a video displaying different exercises with various equipment in the gym, noting in the caption that she used to focus primarily on cardio, yoga and Pilates.
“Since moving to Miami, I have shifted my focus to weightlifting and resistance training, and it has been transformative in helping me build muscle and shift my body composition in ways I hadn’t imagined,” she wrote.
“I believe in a strength training approach built on foundational, time-tested and simple movements – squats, deadlifts, hinges, pushes and pulls. These are the cornerstones of my workout, emphasizing functional strength for life.”
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Trump added that prioritizing form is “essential” to ensure results before adding on weight.
“This ensures a safe and steady progression while maintaining the integrity of each movement,” she continued. “I incorporate mobility work within my sessions to enhance range of motion.”
“I believe in a strength training approach built on foundational, time-tested and simple movements – squats, deadlifts, hinges, pushes and pulls,” Ivanka Trump wrote in an October Instagram post. (Ivanka Trump/Instagram)
“Weightlifting has enhanced not just my strength but my overall athleticism and resilience,” she added.
Trump said she dedicates three to four days a week to strength training, including two solo sessions and two with a personal trainer.
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She also said that increasing her protein intake has also been “critical” to her progress.
“I now consume between 30 and 50 grams of protein a meal,” she said. “It works … I’ve never been stronger!”
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are seen arriving at the beachside eatery on May 2, 2024, in Miami Beach, Florida. (MEGA/GC Images)
Trump also still enjoys weekly yoga sessions, spending time outdoors with her children and playing sports with friends, she said.
“I also incorporate a couple of short (10-minute), high-intensity interval training sessions (such as sprints) each week to keep my cardiovascular fitness sharp and dynamic,” she noted.
“This balanced approach has infused new energy into my fitness routine and yielded great results.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Ivanka Trump for comment.
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