The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

by Jeff Goodell

In addition to the immediate risks of heat exposure such as heatstroke, there can be serious long-term health consequences. In El Salvador and Costa Rica, an epidemic of chronic kidney disease has hit farmworkers who work in hot sugarcane fields—twenty thousand workers have died since 2002 and thousands of others have had to go on kidney dialysis to survive. The disease has been rising among workers in hot climates around the world, including Florida and California. An editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine predicts that chronic kidney disease “is likely to be just one of many heat-sensitive illnesses that will be unmasked and accelerated by climate change.”