The official death toll from Hurricane Milton may not be telling the whole story.

New research suggests that lasting damage from storms like Milton could result in thousands of additional deaths in future years, particularly among the most

vulnerable in society. Sarah Kaplan is a Washington Post climate and science

reporter, so Sarah this study says that additional deaths could be caused by hurricanes 15 years beyond.

How does this happen?

These researchers, based in California, did an analysis of death tolls and states that have been infected by hurricanes for the last 100 years.

They looked at 500 tropical cyclones.

And what they found is this consistent pattern of every time a hurricane hit a state, the death rates in that

state were higher than they were before the hurricane. This is a kind of

statistical analysis that is often used to sort of identify initial signals that there is

something dangerous happening in public health. So it's the same methodology

that for example researchers initially used to realize that smoking was linked with health problems.

What they find is that after a hurricane hits a state might see between 7,000 and 11,000 deaths

for as long as 15 years afterward.

And it's because of the disruption that the hurricane causes

to the health system, to the economy,

to people's social networks, and to their mental health.

Did it find that there were groups of people who were particularly badly affected by this?

I was talking with one first responder who said a rule of thumb in disasters is that the person who is most vulnerable

after a storm is the same as the person who is most vulnerable before a storm.

So all of the things the inequalities that we know exist in our society

definitely play out and get exacerbated by the inequalities that we know exist in our society

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