France says summer heat wave killed 1,500 people

The brutal heat wave that hit France this summer contributed to the deaths of 1,500 people, the country's health minister said Sunday.

The heat wave spanned 18 days in June and July, and there were over 1,000 more deaths than the yearly average for that time period, Agnes Buzyn said. Half of the people who died were over 75.

In 2003, a heat wave killed 15,000 people in France, and Buzyn said lessons learned from that helped the government come up with a public awareness campaign this summer. "We have succeeded — thanks to prevention, thanks to workable messages the French population heeded — to reduce fatalities by a factor of 10," she said.

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