REACTIONS TO GREAT ENVIRONMENTAL HEAT IN ANIMALS 



Dr Frank Marsh 

 (London) 



The sun, we are told, is a shining example of an atom bomb. It is difficult for 

 people living in England — where the sun is rarely seen, and the weather is a 

 national joke — to have any idea of the severe trials undergone by travellers or in- 

 digenes in the Arabian Desert, or even in the cooler Sahara. The celebrated Wes- 

 tern Desert between Tripoli and Alexandria is probably cooler still; but this state- 

 ment may be disputed. 'Animal Life in Deserts* is a big subject treated scientifi- 

 cally in the classical publication of that name. The modern problem is to provide 

 living space for an ever increasing human world population, and also to provide 

 adequate nutriments for this human mass. The great deserts of the world, the 

 Sahara, the Arabian deserts, the Central Asian deserts, the deserts of California and 

 Mexico, the Australian deserts and the cold deserts at the poles are all being 

 thoughtfully surveyed by contemporary man. These great sterile wastes can all be 

 made fertile, green and productive by capital expenditure — as shown by Ritchie 

 Calder in 'Men Against the Desert' — and by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 

 United States of America. Geologists and technicians know that 'wild cat' expendi- 

 ture of capital may provide very substantial returns for a relatively small outlay. 

 Valuable minerals and oil are nearly always found in barren, rocky or sandy wastes, 

 far from the outposts of civilization and subject to all climatic extremes, The fact 

 that some very valuable raw material is found even in the middle of the Sahara, 

 causes an immigration of technicians and their associated civil engineers, surveyors, 

 domestic and administrative staff and other parasites, who may include even a rude 

 medical or health service. This closely knit community will develop gardens, 

 bushes, shrubs and small trees, to mitigate the severity of the landscape, filter the 

 hot winds, provide some fresh vegetables and add to the amenities of clubs and 

 dwellings, however rudimentary. A little oasis will appear in a situation that — a 

 few years earlier — was nothing but a howling wilderness. This miraculous trans- 

 formation — for it is nothing less — is due to the patient spare time efforts of men, 

 and their devoted wives, with a desire for the amenities of life, but with no special 

 knowledge of desert reclamation, except what could be picked up as they went along. 

 The men who construct these commercial installations 'in the blue' are mercifully 

 free from many of the disorders of civilization; they do, however, risk a number of 

 unfamiliar disorders which are not absolutely confined to the brown tropics, but can 

 be described as very rare in temperate regions. One of the most dramatic and dis- 

 abling of these exotic afflictions of men is the syndrome often referred to as 'effects 

 of heat'. The effects of heat are, shortly, dehydration, high fever, affections of the 

 skin, with unconsciousness in the acute or hyperthermic cases, and lassitude, debi- 

 lity, faintness, malaise, slight fever, cramps, tetany, headaches, weakness and other 

 symptoms in the prodromal, sub- acute or chronic varieties of the disorder. Effects 

 of heat are preventable, and should be prevented in any settled community, but the 

 'wild cat' pioneers have none of the resources of civilization and take great risks. 

 Observations on the effects of heat on utterly unprotected personnel impelled me to 



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