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Heat
Row Sparks Initiative on Elderly
By AFPAugust 26, 2003French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre
Raffarin was to meet Tuesday with health care professionals to discuss the
plight of the elderly in the wake of a devastating heat wave that left
thousands dead across France. The meeting, to be presided over
by Raffarin himself, was to bring together government ministers,
retirement home directors and workers providing in-home care to older
people to flesh out an action plan to protect the frail and aged. The initiative comes as the
centre-right government finds itself on the back foot, battling
unrelenting criticism of its handling of the crisis stemming from the
punishing heat that scorched France for the first two weeks of August. The country's largest
undertakers' group has put the death toll at about 10,000, but the
government has vehemently disputed that figure, with Health Minister
Jean-Francois Mattei estimating mid-month that some 3,000 had died. A new toll is expected to be
released in the coming days, according to state secretary for the elderly
Hubert Falco, who will participate in Tuesday's meeting, due to begin at
7:30 pm. Amid controversy over the final
tally, France remained in a state of shock as up to 400 bodies remained
unclaimed in makeshift morgues outside Paris, while a team of 100 city
workers raced to locate relatives of the dead. "We might not have a
remarkable success rate, but at least we'll know we did all that we
could," said one worker at a crisis centre in the east of the
capital. Refrigerated trucks and a food
warehouse outside Paris that have been used to store the backlog of bodies
were to close September 1, forcing city officials to bury some of the dead
in graves normally reserved for the poor and homeless. "450 forgotten dead: we're
all guilty," read the front-page headline of the popular daily Le
Parisien, counting 400 bodies in Paris and 50 corpses left in the
southwestern city of Bordeaux, where families refused to pay burial fees. The interministerial action plan
for the elderly, requested by President Jacques Chirac and baptized
"Aging and Solidarity", is due to be revealed in October,
Raffarin's office said in a statement. Government spokesman
Jean-Francois Cope on Tuesday described the effort as "a response
plan for the long term", saying it would help reorganize public
services dealing with the elderly and improve emergency medical treatment.
But the government faced ongoing
public fury: in a poll released Monday by the Louis Harris institute, 66
percent of those asked said the government had been
"ineffective" in its handling of the health crisis sparked by
the heat wave. A separate poll to be published
this week in the news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur showed that half of
French people thought that Chirac "did not do what he should have
done" with respect to the crisis. Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging
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