Experts Fear Summer Heat Will Lead to Rise in Deaths

The unusual heat across the United States this summer is overwhelming vulnerable people, especially the elderly, and will be responsible for thousands of deaths, an expert on health and the environment says.

But most of those deaths will pass with little notice and be recorded in government statistics as heart attacks or strokes rather than heat-related fatalities, said the expert, W. Moulton Avery, executive director of the Center for Environmental Physiology in Washington. The nonprofit center does research on what effect heat and cold have on humans.

Mr. Avery said in an interview Tuesday that stifling temperatures this summer threaten to exact a higher death toll than the 1980 heat wave, which he estimates killed 15,000 Americans.

''If I had in my hand right now the number of people that have died this summer it would be front-page news all over the country, but I don't have that number,'' Mr. Avery said. Reporting System Sought

He has argued for a reporting system to record heat deaths, but statisticians must depend on comparing deaths in heat wave years with normal years and calculating the excess fatalities. That was the system used to determine the 15,000 heat-related deaths in 1980.

''What we're living through now is the same thing we were living through in 1980,'' he said.

Normal death rates nearly doubled from Oklahoma to the East Coast in a 1966 heat wave, with deaths jumping to five times normal in St. Louis, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The Senate Special Committee on Aging has reported that heat waves in 1963 and 1966 took a total of 11,000 lives.

And a study for the University of California at Berkeley found that hot spells in Los Angeles in 1939, 1955 and 1963 each produced more excess deaths than any recorded natural disaster in that state, including the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.

Those most vulnerable to heat stress are the elderly, who may already suffer from various ailments, Mr. Avery said. In 1980 the elderly accounted for 70 percent of the excess deaths in the hot weather, he said.

After a few days of a heat wave, the elderly begin to arrive at hospitals with heat-related problems, said Dr. Keith Sivertson, director of emergency medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

He said older people ''are more vulnerable for a variety of reasons, mostly because their physiologic reserve is gone with age.''

''Their heart function tends to be just enough, their mental function tends to be just enough, all of their organs are functioning just enough,'' he said. ''For some folks, it's not quite enough on some days, and they end up in the hospital.''

In addition, Dr. Sivertson said the elderly used more prescription medications and many of those drugs could increase sensitivity to the heat.

Mr. Avery said that heat-caused deaths did not arouse the concern they should because of the lack of a reporting system.

As a result, only classic cases of heat stroke get reported officially as heat deaths to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and those amount to perhaps 200 in a normal summer and 1,500 to 1,600 in a hot summer, he said.