Summer in Australia can be a nightmare, especially for workers such as tradies, whose jobs may involve spending significant time outside in sweltering temperatures. 

It’s a fairly critical issue given the risks and potential impacts of not being optimally hydrated. And it’s something News Corp papers including the Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun explore in an interview with our CEO, Professor Mark Kendall. 

One of the topics journalist David Mills highlights in this edited extract is the body’s built-in mechanism for detecting the needs for fluids, and whether it’s enough.  

“It’s imprecise, and it doesn’t work quite often,” Prof Kendall said. “The thirst mechanism can kick in quite late, when you’re already very dehydrated.” 
And it gets worse. 
“The sensors in our body that tell us we need to drink deteriorate as we get older, so we lose the capacity to know that we need to hydrate,” he said.  
“From the age of 50 it goes down a steep decline.” 
That’s a particular problem, as older Australians are far more likely to suffer and die from excessive heat. (One study said 69 per cent of heat-related fatalities came from people over 60.) 
And in the aged care sector, overstretched staff often don’t have time to monitor hydration levels of residents, or they use insufficient methods like pinch-testing the skin to determine if there’s a problem. 
“It’s quite shocking how rudimentary the methods are for dealing with dehydration, given how big the problem actually is. Our approach addresses that,” Prof Kendall said. 

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