Heat exhaustion is the body's response to an excessive loss of water and salt contained in sweat. Those most prone to heat exhaustion are elderly people, people with high blood pressure and people working or exercising in a hot environment.

Warning Signs of Heat Exhaustion:

Heavy sweating, dizziness or fainting, paleness, muscle cramps, headache, tiredness and weakness and nausea or vomiting.

What to Do:

Rest in a cool area, preferably air-conditioned.

Wear loose clothing, cool down with a shower, take a bath or a sponge bath, drink plenty of non-alcoholic and caffeine-free beverages, and seek medical attention if symptoms worsen or last longer than one hour.

How to Prevent Heat-Related Illness:

Be aware of the warning signs of heat-related illness such as light-headedness, mild nausea or confusion, sleepiness or profuse sweating.

While outdoors, rest frequently in a shady area so that your body's thermostat has a chance to recover.

Schedule outdoor activities carefully, preferably before noon or in the evening. If unaccustomed to working or exercising in a hot environment, start slowly and pick up the pace gradually.

Wear sunscreen to protect your skin, sunburn affects your body's ability to cool itself and causes a loss in body fluids.

Wear lightweight, light colored, loose fitting clothing.

When working in the heat, monitor the condition of your co-workers and have someone do the same for you.

Stay indoors and in an air-conditioned environment if possible, consider a shopping mall, public library, supermarket or other air-conditioned locations for a few hours.

Check on those at greatest risk of heat related illness such as infants and children up to 4 years of age, people 65 years of age or older, people who are overweight, people who overexert during work or exercise and people who are ill or on certain medications.

Electric fans may be useful to increase comfort and to draw cool air into your home at night, but do not rely on a fan as your primary cooling device during a heat wave.

Avoid drinks containing caffeine, alcohol or large amounts of sugar.

Avoid very cold beverages because they can cause stomach cramps. In addition, limit your exercise or work time.

Use of Fans for Cooling

In order for a fan to be effective, the skin surface must be moist. When the skin surface is moist, moving air removes heat from the skin as the moisture evaporates. Unfortunately, when a person begins to develop heat stroke, they stop sweating. In addition, elderly persons may not sweat due to poor heat regulation messages sent out by their brain centers. If a fan is to be effective, the skin must be moist either with sweat or dampened clothing, or with moisture added by rubbing wet cloths over the skin surface.

Although fans are less expensive to operate, they may not be effective as indicated above, and may even be harmful, when temperatures are very high. As the air temperature rises, airflow is increasingly ineffective in cooling the body until finally, at temperatures above about 100 degrees F (the exact number varies with the humidity), increasing air movement actually increases heat stress. More specifically, when the temperature of the air rises to about 100oFm the fan may be delivering overheated air to the skin at a rate that exceeds the capacity of the body to get rid of this heat, even with sweating, and the net effect is to add heat rather than to cool the body. The widespread distribution of fans, often practiced in the past as a heat-relief measure, thus appears unlikely to be particularly effective in preventing major heat-related health effects when temperatures are very high. The better alternative by far when the temperature soars, is to use an air conditioner if one is available or to seek shelter in an air-conditioned building.

DID YOU KNOW?

Seniors are living longer-during the last decade, the most rapid growth came in those 85 and older-they increased 38% - 3.1 million from 1990 to 4.2 million in 2000!

Reprinted with permission of the Springfield, Missouri Office of the Southwest Missouri Office on Aging.