Tool tracks heat-related illness

North Carolina public health officials used recent heat waves to use a monitoring tool that can track heat-related hospital visits.

The North Carolina Disease Event Tracking and Epidemiologic Collection Tool (NC-DETECT) tracks emergency department patient visits and Carolina Poison Control Center calls to monitor public health. The tool is usually used to track communicable diseases but can be programmed to look for other health problems.

Between Aug. 4 and Aug. 10, NC-DETECT found there were an average of 84 heat-related emergency room visits a day, compared to an average of 12 a day in the months before the heat wave, according to a news release.

On Aug. 9, 150 visits happened.

Those visits yielded some surprising information. Typically young children and the elderly are the primary targets of warnings about heat-related incidents. But NC-DETECT found that people between 15-19 and 25-44 had the highest rate of heat-related emergency department visits.

Public health officials suspect the visits were caused by exertion during outdoor work or exercise.

NC-DETECT monitors 104 of the state's 111 24-hour emergency departments.

"We need to talk to those people in our warnings and tell them that they can become sick as a result of excessive heat," said State Health Director Dr. Leah Devlin in a statement. "In particular, they need to watch their exertion level and remain hydrated. In the future, we'll be talking to those people as well as the frail elderly and folks who care for the very young. Without NC-DETECT, we would not know just how much risk they face."