FRANCE: France's two-week long heatwave is assuming the proportions of a national disaster, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris.
Dr Patrick Pelloux, the president of the Association of Hospital Emergency Room Doctors, announced yesterday that more than 100 people have died as a direct result of high temperatures. Most macabre of all, Le Parisien reported that funeral homes in the Paris region, overwhelmed by a 20 per cent rise in the mortality rate, are picking up bodies at least 24 hours late.
An employee of the Sauvanon funeral home told the newspaper: "Families are having to keep their dead at home for several days, because the funeral establishments in the Yvelines, Essonne and Hauts-de-Seine departments are all full. In some cases, but unfortunately not all, we send an embalmer to the home to prevent the body deteriorating."
Five hundred people have been hospitalised with heat stroke in Paris alone.
Sunday and Monday nights were the hottest in the French capital since records began in 1873 - 30 degrees at midnight.
Across France, nine army teaching hospitals are admitting civilian patients.
Six hundred thousand chickens and 50,000 pigs have died, and some farmers have stopped feeding their poultry because it risks killing them by raising their body temperature. The farmers' union FNSEA says the summer weather will cost at least €100 million. The government has allocated €37 million and announced yesterday that it will seek assistance from the EU's agricultural disaster fund.
Opposition politicians are criticising Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin's centre-right government for failing to foresee the hot spell, and for underestimating its consequences. The socialist leader Mr Francois Hollande accused the authorities of passivity and inertia, while the former minister Mr Jack Lang said it was "incomprehensible" that there was no real crisis plan in action.
Mr Raffarin, who has not interrupted his holiday in the French Alps, issued a statement yesterday, saying that a "partisan mentality has no place in the exceptional situation we are living through".
Mr Alain Madelin was more pointed: "I don't remember the socialists predicting any heatwaves." Even the socialist Dr Bernard Kouchner defended the authorities, saying people were mistaken if they thought the government could lower temperatures at will.
Accusations by Dr Pelloux, who represents emergency room doctors, were most damaging. He called the government's handling of the crisis "scandalous" and said doctors have received no instructions from the health ministry.