☂Health

a 108 °F heat index across nine states, flood-water exposure on three continents, and two humanitarian ledgers still being counted

Heat is the acute call and water is the slow one. Thirteen heat advisories from Arkansas to Alabama, plus Kansas, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, at an index near 108 °F, is a cooling-centre and outdoor-worker decision for today — the advisory tier, not the warning tier, is the one that covers most of the people actually exposed. Behind it, standing flood water in northern Vietnam and along the Benue is a waterborne-disease and safe-water problem that peaks days after the rain stops and gets less attention for exactly that reason; the Nigerian correction changes the planning window, because rain-driven flooding has no published schedule the way a release would. And in Nepal, a recovery still running against a reported at least 1,410 dead and about 6,145 missing is a mental-health and identification burden as much as a medical one, including for the 607 foreign nationals from 34 countries among the counted. (Handled with care.) Who owns it: a public-health officer sequencing today's heat against next week's water.

carried on 30 of the last 65 editions — since Jul 20, the 10 most recent shown.