The call, made in Le Figaro newspaper, followed the resignation Monday of a top French health official, Lucien Abenhaim, over the stunning estimated death toll linked to the hot weather that roasted the country in the first two weeks of August.

It also came as France's neighbours started to take stock of the human cost of the heat wave, which brought temperatures of 40 degrees Celsiusdegrees Fahrenheit) and above to large parts of Europe.

One newspaper in Spain, La Vanguardia, said that the deaths of "several hundred, probably well over one thousand, can be linked directly to the heat wave."

Elderly people everywhere were the main victims. Many had languished at home alone while their families left for traditional month-long summer vacations, and their frail constitutions suffered badly in the heat.

French Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei admitted Monday that it was "plausible" that the national toll was 5,000, but said precise figures would be known in the coming weeks.

He accepted Abenhaim's resignation after deflecting accusations from doctors' groups that his ministry had failed to adequately warn the public or react fast enough to the crisis by blaming Abenhaim's office for not having alerted him sooner.

Abenhaim told Le Parisien newspaper that the criticism was "totally unjustified" but added that he decided to step down because "they absolutely want scapegoats".

An independent inquiry into the state's handling of the disaster -- something demanded from the left-wing opposition -- would show what happened, he predicted.

Raffarin has also been struggling to duck out of the way of the finger-pointing.

He initially blamed part of the death toll on low staffing in hospitals resulting from a 35-hour work week introduced by the previous Socialist government.

But when medical staff protested that they had rushed back from vacations to tend to patients, he changed tack, saying the fault lay with French society for abandonding senior citizens.

In his Le Figaro interview Tuesday, Raffarin appeared to shift the responsibility on to Abenhaim's office.

"The real question is about our alert system. I want to be sure that we gave the alert in the best conditions... I have asked the health minister to evaluate our alert system," he said.

Mattei responded Tuesday by announcing the creation of a task force of four senior doctors to inquire into how the heat-wave crisis was handled. A report was expected by the end of the month and would concentrate on the way the alarm was raised.

The left-wing newspaper Liberation sharpened its attack on the government, saying that, while civil servants like Abenhaim were "handy fuses" that help ministers prevent their careers from being short-circuited, the ministers could not escape the allegations that they tried to downplay the crisis despite the warnings.

The issue was likely to dominate a cabinet meeting scheduled for Thursday which was to be chaired by President Jacques Chirac, who was said to have closely monitored the heat wave and its effects from his vacation retreat in Canada.

TERRA.WIRE