Yeah, but it used to be uncommon; ordinary precautions usually sufficed to protect people. And acute kidney injury used to be fixable.
What's dangerous is that increasing heat makes it both more frequent, and more likely to do permanent damage rather than just a couple crappy days in the hospital. It's not just that the public isn't aware of the risks for permanent damage, the medics have years of "he'll be fine in a few days" to overcome and realize that they need to schedule a followup visit and badger insurance to pay for that.
If we don't get the hell ahead of this, we're going to lose a lot of mostly ablebodied laborers to crippling kidney injury, right when we can least afford it.
Re: Kidney damage
What's dangerous is that increasing heat makes it both more frequent, and more likely to do permanent damage rather than just a couple crappy days in the hospital. It's not just that the public isn't aware of the risks for permanent damage, the medics have years of "he'll be fine in a few days" to overcome and realize that they need to schedule a followup visit and badger insurance to pay for that.
If we don't get the hell ahead of this, we're going to lose a lot of mostly ablebodied laborers to crippling kidney injury, right when we can least afford it.