"Last summer, Taylor Weckstein was driving around rural New Mexico in a van delivering medical care to the homeless in the sweltering heat.

The Harvard Medical School graduate came across people with severe dehydration, kidney disease and third-degree burns from being seared by the pavement, she recalled.

“Honestly, it was pretty horrific,” she said.

The suffering she encountered during her rotation with the Indian Health Service providing medical care from a van led to research on the implications of extreme heat on homeless people across the country. That research, published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, found that the rate that homeless people visited an emergency department for heat-related illnesses was 27 times that of others in the United States."

Joshua Partlow reports for the Washington Post June 9, 2025. [2]