The New Yorker:

Their health effects extend far beyond official death tolls.

By Clayton Dalton

In August, 2005, Anand Irimpen, a cardiologist and a professor at Tulane University, evacuated New Orleans during the approach of Hurricane Katrina. He and his family watched it make landfall from a hotel room in Dallas. “The storm passed by and I was ready to go home,” Irimpen told me. “But then my wife said, ‘The levees broke. We can’t go back.’ ” The damage to New Orleans lingered; they ended up staying in Dallas for months. And when his hospital finally reopened, in February of the following year, doctors began noticing unexpected changes. “My fellows said they were seeing more heart attacks than before the storm,” Irimpen recalled.

At first, he thought they must be exaggerating. “You can’t just saythat,” he told them. “You have to do a study.” So his team collected data on heart attacks for two years and compared it to pre-Katrina data. “I was blown away,” he said. The rate of heart attacks at his hospital was three times what it had been before the storm, a finding that made the Times-Picayune. Perhaps even more surprising is that the rate has remained elevated ever since. “I thought that in a year or two we’d come back to baseline,” Irimpen told me. “It hasn’t decreased at all.”

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