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Heat wave: Alcohol can be a serious danger to your health
As Europe sweats through a record heat wave, health warnings written for drinking alcohol are growing louder. Deutsche Welle and The Guardian report that alcohol can dehydrate the body, strain the heart, and raise the risk of heatstroke, while Paris has temporarily banned public drinking after a surge in cardiac arrests.
Europe is in the grip of a heat wave, and two European news organisations — Deutsche Welle and The Guardian — have each used the occasion to warn that drinking alcohol in the heat can be a serious danger to health.
Deutsche Welle, citing a report published in the medical journal The Lancet, notes that the number of heat-related deaths has risen across much of Europe and that heat warnings have become more frequent. In Paris, where temperatures have hovered around 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), alcohol was banned from public spaces during last weekend's "Fête de la Musique" festival, according to that outlet. The Guardian adds that Parisians now face a wider temporary ban on drinking alcohol in public, which it reports was imposed in part after a four-fold rise in cardiac arrests in a 24-hour period.
The warnings speak to something well-established in both accounts: while a cold beer may feel refreshing, its effect on the body in extreme heat is the opposite of cooling
How each outlet told it
Deutsche Welle
Framing: Heat wave and alcohol consumption — Warning
Facts Included:
Number of heat-related deaths has risen across much of Europe
Number of heat warnings in Europe has increased
Alcohol can dehydrate the body to such an extent that it produces too little sweat
Alcohol increases the urge to pee, leading to even more fluid loss
Cold beer causes blood vessels to dilate which can lower blood pressure
Each row is one claim, attributed to the outlet whose wording states it most clearly. Confidence rates how directly the source text states the claim — explicit and unhedged rates high; hedged, pieced-together, or internally inconsistent statements rate lower. It does not measure whether the claim is true. Status counts the distinct outlets we found asserting it — so a single-source claim can still show high confidence, and a multi-source claim can show medium. Every one of those outlets is named beside the status, so you can check the count against the list. For claims extracted before we began storing that list, the row says so: it names the outlet the claim is quoted from and states that we have not recorded which outlets backed it. Outlets wrote at different times, so a figure that evolves — a casualty count, for example — can legitimately differ between rows; check the "as of" time next to each claim's source.
Claim
Confidence
Status
ClaimParisians face a temporary ban on drinking alcohol in public to reduce the pressure on the hospitals after a four-fold rise in cardiac arrests in a 24-hour period.
ConfidenceHigh
StatusMulti-source quoted from The Guardian — Worldthe outlets behind this status were not recorded for this claim
ClaimThe number of heat-related deaths has risen across much of Europe.