When Rupa Basu was pregnant with her second child, her body temperature felt out of control — particularly as her third trimester began in the summer of 2007. It wasn’t particularly hot in Oakland, California, with high temperatures reaching 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Still, she felt uncomfortably warm even as her colleagues and friends were unbothered.
As her October due date approached, she drank extra fluids and avoided going outside during the hottest stretch of the day. “This is really weird,” she recalls thinking. She wondered if there could be a biological mechanism at work.
That notion had troubling implications. “If this is a biological response, imagine what’s happening in places like India and Africa where the heat can get to an unbearable 130 degrees Fahrenheit,” Basu remembers thinking. As a researcher at the California Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, Basu knew that other vulnerable populations, notably the elderly, were particularly susceptible to heat.
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