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A British man in his 50s has been found dead on a sunbed in Crete.
The unnamed 54-year-old was found unconscious on a beach in the popular village of Stalida on Saturday night, according to reports in Greece.
Beach officials became concerned and notified the emergency services after the tourist remained “motionless” on a sunlounger for several hours, the Creta Post reported.
Medics performed CPR on the tourist to no avail, and he was pronounced dead at Heraklion University Hospital, the publication said.
The Foreign Office confirmed to The Independent on Monday that it was “supporting the family of a British man who has died in Crete”.
An autopsy will reportedly be carried out to determine his cause of death.
Temperatures in Crete peaked at 30C over the weekend, and firefighters on the island have been battling wildfires in the inland municipality of Agios Vassiliou, which is situated some 55 miles west of Stalida.
The fires are reported to have burned thousands of acres of agricultural land, including olive groves, beehives and pastures, and are said to have reached Agia Galini on the island’s south coast.
In the UK, the Met Office has said temperatures could reach 43C this week – a huge leap from the previous record of 38.7C set just three years ago – and experts have warned the heatwave may lead to thousands of excess deaths.
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Heatwaves are the deadliest extreme weather event in the UK, and official figures show that two heat episodes in 2021, which were both less extreme than this week’s, led to some 1,600 excess deaths.
“I think that, assuming the weather forecasts are roughly correct, it’s very likely that there will be hundreds or thousands of excess deaths from the heat in the next few days,” Professor Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University, told The Guardian on Friday.
“It’s possible that, because there have been so many warnings about the coming high temperatures, people and businesses will be taking more precautions than usually happen in a heatwave, which could lower the numbers of excess deaths. I hope that happens, but I fear there will still be excess death on quite a scale.”
The government has declared the UK’s first-ever national heat emergency, while the Met Office also issued a “red” alert for heat for the first time, warning of “population-wide adverse health effects”, which it said could cause “serious illness or danger to life”.
Scientists have warned that such events will only become more frequent and severe as a result of climate breakdown, and earlier this year the Met Office raised the threshold for weather to be considered a heatwave in parts of the UK to reflect the country’s warming climate.
