Inside a heat chamber
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Kreycik had almost everything on his side when he went running on that hot day: he was extremely fit, relatively young and was an experienced runner.
While some people are more vulnerable to heat than others, including the very old and young, no one is immune — not even the world’s top athletes. Many are expressing anxiety as temperatures are forecast to soar past 95 degrees this week in Paris, as the Olympic Games get underway.
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Scientists are still trying to unravel the many ways heat attacks the body. One way they do this is with environmental chambers: rooms where they can test human response to a huge range of temperature and humidity.
CNN visited one such chamber at the University of South Wales in the UK to experience how heat kills, but in a safe and controlled environment.
“We’ll warm you up and things will slowly start to unravel,” warned Damian Bailey, a physiology and biochemistry professor at the university. Bailey uses a plethora of instruments to track vital signs — heart rate, brain blood flow and skin temperature — while subjects are at rest or doing light exercise on a bike.
The room starts at a comfortable 73 degrees Fahrenheit but ramps up to 104. Then scientists hit their subjects with extreme humidity, shooting from a dry 20% to an oppressive 85%.
“That’s the killer,” Bailey said, “it’s the humidity you cannot acclimatize to.”
And that’s when things get tough.