NURSING: ATTENTION AND CARE IN A HEAT WAVE.

Abstract

The heatstroke is an medical emergency and the cause of multiorganic failure. It is characterize by an increase of the corporal temperature above 40ºC and nervious system alteration where predominates the encephalopathy and it is usual the coma. Usually, the task done with cool weather are realtively easy, but become harder if they are done with hot weather. The physiological adjust that improve the tolerance are called collectively heat acclimatization adjustment; the best acclimatization occurs the first week of exposition and it finish in ten days. Men, as mammal animals, to live, need to mantain the corporal temperature between 36,8ºC and 37ºC indepently of the ambient temperature. The alteration of the temperature origins changes in the organism, it can tolerate 10ºc of internal temperature and an increase of 5ºC, the failure of the thermal mechanisms can produce the death. The thermic charge that can support the organism is a constant that lies on very thin limits and should be always zero. The internal temperature, it´s in dynamic balance between the factors that add corporal heat and those which remove it. This balance is obtained by the integration of the mechanisms that remove heat by evaporation and change it´s rythm of production by the organism. If the increase exceeds the lost the internal temperature increases; with the cold, the lost usually exceeds the production and the internal temperature falls. The corporal temperature increase because of the add from the ambient caused by the solar radiaton and certain objects that are warmer than the body and the chemical reactions in the metabolism (60-70 cal./h), when the muscles active themselves, it´s heat production is very big; with cold the metabolism rythm can increase 3-5 times, during strong exercises the metabolism rythm can increase twenty times the base line. The heat is lost by physic mechanisms of irradiation, conduction, convection and skin evaporation and respiratory tract.