Admitting to a delay in its reaction to the crisis, Russia's health ministry reported that in the worst ever heat wave the country had experienced, the number of deaths had gone up by 50 per cent.
"July 2010 in Russia saw abnormally high temperatures that immediately pushed up death rates from blood circulation illnesses," the health ministry said in a statement, the first official confirmation of a spike in deaths.
"The highest growth in the mortality rate -- 50.7 percent -- was registered in Moscow," it said releasing year-on-year data for July.
In July and part of August, Muscovites sweltered in record temperatures and smouldering peat fires in the surrounding region swathed the city in choking grey smog.
The state statistics service said that 14,340 people died in Moscow in July, up from 9,516 people in the same period last year.
Federal authorities had earlier refused to give details of the Moscow death toll.
The only official to disclose the extent of the toll so far had been Moscow's chief doctor, Andrei Seltsovsky, who earlier this month released grim statistics on mortality and immediately earned a rebuke from the Health and Social Development Minister Tatiana Golikova.
Seltsovsky said that daily rates in Moscow had nearly doubled to around 700, adding that city morgues were overflowing with bodies.
The press has also accused the Moscow authorities of imposing a ban on certifying heatstroke as a cause of death in a bid to keep a lid on the statistics -- a claim authorities repeatedly denied -- and one newspaper report said that bodies had to be stacked upright in coffins in some city morgues. The health ministry acknowledged that it had been slow to respond to the emergency.
