Heat events - prolonged periods of hot weather - cause more deaths in Minnesota than any other natural disaster.
Heat-related illness encompasses many health problems: dehydration, heat stress, heat exhaustion and heat stroke.
These can occur when the body becomes too hot and cannot cool down. Heat also can make worse existing chronic
conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease and respiratory conditions. Health and demographic data are shown
together to help identify areas where people are potentially at increased risk for heat-related illness.
See more maps for populations that are vulnerable to
heat-related illness. For more information, visit MN Public Health Data
Access: Heat-related Illness.
Data Notes
- The counts are not whole numbers due to how we determined county. To calculate the number of
counts per county, we used zip codes to figure out which county each case belongs to. Some zip codes in Minnesota cross
county boundaries, so a weighted method is used to split cases. For example, in the zip code 56318 60% of people live in
Todd County and 40% live in Morrison County. So a hospitalization or ED visit with this zip code would add 0.6 count to
Todd County and 0.4 to Morrison County. This ensures each county is represented as accurately as possible given we only
have zip code information.
- Total population is the combined population for the years indicated from the US Census
Bureau's Population Estimates Program (5 or 10-year combined total population).
- Population characteristics (poverty, elderly and living alone) are from the 5-year American
Community Survey.
- To allow visualization of more county data than viewing data in one-year segments would allow,
data are aggregated into 5 or 10-year time periods.
- To protect privacy, heat hospitalization or emergency department counts less than 6 are
“suppressed” if the underlying population is less than 100,000 people. Geographies with suppressed data are greyed out on the
map, indicated by two asterisks (**) in the table, and pop-up window and identified as “data not shown.”
- Age-adjusted rates based on counts less than 20 should be interpreted with caution – the
rate may not be reliable because it can change dramatically with the addition or subtraction of a single case. Geographies
considered to have an “unstable rate” are indicated by a single asterisk (*) in the table and pop-up window.
- Below 185% poverty includes households below the federal poverty level (FPL) and households
with incomes 185% times above the FPL, to include families that are near-poor or working poor.
- These data include Minnesota residents discharged from hospitals in Minnesota, North Dakota,
South Dakota, and Iowa. However, Minnesota residents who sought care at Wisconsin hospitals are not included, so rates for
counties bordering Wisconsin may be underestimated.
- These data do not include hospitalizations from Veterans Affairs or Indian Health Service
hospitals.
- For additional information about the data, visit
About the Heat-related Illness Data.
Data Sources
- US Census Bureau
- American Community Survey
- Minnesota Hospital Association