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In Phoenix, where daytime temperatures are topping 110 degrees Fahrenheit for the third straight week, emergency room doctors think of extreme heat as the public health emergency it has proved itself to be: In 2022, Arizona’s Maricopa County reported a 25% increase in heat-related mortality from the previous year. “Heat is just something we know we need to be really worried about,” said Geoff Comp, an emergency medicine physician at Valleywise Health Medical Center. Protocols developed by Comp, who is also associate program director of the Creighton School of Medicine/Valleywise emergency medicine residency, include treating heat stroke victims with the latest standard of care: immersive cooling in a body bag filled with ice and zipped to about shoulder level. (Pennar, 7/18)

Phoenix's relentless streak of dangerously hot days was poised to smash a record for major U.S. cities on Tuesday, the 19th straight day the desert city was to see temperatures soar to 110 degrees Fahrenheit or more. Nighttime has offered little relief from the brutal temperatures. Phoenix's low of 95 degrees on Monday was its highest overnight low ever, topping the previous record of 93 degrees set in 2009. It was the eighth straight day of temperatures not falling below 90, another record. (7/18)

The southern United States is in its third week of an extreme and stubborn heat wave that refuses to budge. It continues to set records as nearly 100 million Americans remain under heat alerts from South Florida to northern Nevada. The intensity of the heat wave probably peaked on Sunday in California’s Central Valley and the Desert Southwest. Temperatures climbed as high as 128 degrees in Death Valley and approached all-time records in Reno, Nev.; Las Vegas; Flagstaff, Ariz.; and Salt Lake City. Although temperatures won’t be quite as high in the Southwest in the coming days, it will still be dangerously hot, and more records could be set. (Cappucci, 7/17)

The sweltering temperatures come after the journal Nature reported that more than 60,000 peopled died in Europe in heat waves last summer. Record-breaking temperatures are also searing the southern United States, and the Earth is enduring its hottest period in modern records. (Livingston, 7/17)

Millions of people from the Great Plains to the Northeast were under air-quality alerts Monday as smoke billowed into the U.S. again from Canadian wildfires that may continue to rage into the fall. (Lukpat, 7/17)

For Chicagoans planning a lengthy outdoor run Monday, “today is not necessarily the day for that,” according to Kim Biggs of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. Extensive swaths of the northern United States awoke to unhealthy air quality Monday morning or were experiencing it by midafternoon, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow.gov Smoke and Fire map. (Savage, 7/17)

Air quality across New York City and Washington is unhealthy for sensitive groups, along with other major US cities along the Interstate 95 corridor and worse in Pittsburgh and across the Midwest. Air quality index in Manhattan reached 142, just below the 151- to 200-point range where it would be considered unhealthy for all, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow.gov. It has reached 138 in Washington and 122 in Philadelphia. (Sullivan, 7/17)