French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin met Tuesday with health care professionals to discuss the plight of the elderly in the wake of a devastating heat wave that left thousands dead across France.
The meeting, presided over by Raffarin himself, brought together government ministers, retirement home directors and workers providing in-home care to older people to flesh out an action plan to protect the frail and aged.
"The response we bring to this problem can only be a collective one," Raffarin told representatives of some 20 organizations invited to attend.
The initiative comes as the center-right government finds itself on the back foot, battling unrelenting criticism of its handling of the crisis stemming from the punishing heat that scorched France for the first two weeks of this month.
The country's largest undertakers' group has put the death toll at about 10,000, but the government has vehemently disputed that figure, with Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei estimating mid-month that some 3,000 had died.
A new toll is expected to be released "in the coming days," according to state secretary for the elderly Hubert Falco, who participated in Tuesday's meeting along with Social Affairs Minister Francois Fillon.
Amid controversy over the final tally, France remained in a state of shock as up to 400 bodies remained unclaimed in makeshift morgues outside Paris, while a team of 100 city workers raced to locate relatives of the dead.
Refrigerated trucks and a food warehouse outside Paris that have been used to store the backlog of bodies were due to close Sept. 1, forcing officials to bury some of the dead in graves normally reserved for the poor and homeless.
"450 forgotten dead: we're all guilty," read the front-page headline of the popular daily Le Parisien, counting 400 bodies in Paris and 50 corpses left in the southwestern city of Bordeaux, where families refused to pay burial fees.
Jean-Louis Debre -- speaker of France's lower house of parliament, the National Assembly -- on Tuesday backed opposition calls for the creation of a parliamentary commission to investigate the emergency caused by the heat wave.
"The truth that we owe to the French people -- it's our responsibility to provide that truth whether we're on the right or the left. The truth doesn't belong to left or right, but to all deputies," Debre told Europe 1 radio.
The multi-year interministerial action plan for the elderly, requested by President Jacques Chirac and baptized Aging and Solidarity, is due to be unveiled in October.
Government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope described the effort as "a response plan for the long term," saying it would help reorganize public services dealing with the elderly and improve emergency medical treatment.
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