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Maintaining health, comfort and productivity in heat waves

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journal contribution
posted on 2013-02-28, 09:48 authored by Ken Parsons
Background: The aim of this paper is to summarise what is known about human response to heat and to use this knowledge to provide guidance on how to maintain the health, comfort and performance of people in heat waves. Design: The use of power and especially water are critical in providing cooling. A practical method of cooling people in a water bath is described. A warm bath slowly cooled will provide effective cooling but not thermal trauma. Result: It is concluded that for sedentary and light activities, it is not necessary to cool offices or homes below 258C for thermal comfort. Conclusion: To compare the costs due to loss of productivity caused by a heat wave, with the cost of taking action, more research is needed into the relationship between levels of heat stress and how much distraction and ‘time off task’ it causes.

History

School

  • Design

Citation

PARSONS, K., 2009. Maintaining health, comfort and productivity in heat waves. Global Health Action, 2, pp. p39 - 45.

Publisher

Co-Action Publishing © Ken Parsons

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publication date

2009

Notes

This article was published in the journal, Global Health Action [© Ken Parsons]. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ISSN

1654-9716

eISSN

1654-9880

Language

  • en

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