Posted on 08/20/2015 4:58:19 AM PDT by rickmichaels
Rose Kang describes that whenever a ceiling fan starts to spin, she vomits. After a few hours around any fan, she says, her cheeks start to swell and her head begins to pound. Yet, her experience is relatively minor. In South Korea, newspapers and a government agency report that the air blowing from an electric fan can cause death. “If you fall asleep with it going, you’ll die the next day,” says Kang, who moved from Seoul last year and now works at a hair salon in Toronto’s Koreatown.
The daily newspaper in Ulsan, one of Korea’s largest cities, wrote in 2013 that a 58-year-old man died, after an evening of heavy drinking, due to falling asleep with his fan blowing on him. He went to bed early; his wife called the ambulance at 7:13 p.m., and paramedics arrived 15 minutes later to find him dead. Later that month, Seoul’s main newspaper explained that, after drinking alcohol, sleeping with an electric fan running causes the body temperature to drop fatally low.
Hypothermia is not the only explanation for “fan death,” as the phenomenon is called in English. According to the Korea Consumer Agency, an arm of the government of South Korea, the air from fans may also cause dehydration by drying a person out. The agency warns that fans—and air conditioners—even more frequently lead people to suffocate, as the appliances will recycle exhaled carbon dioxide back into a person’s lungs. It lists “asphyxiation from electric fans and air conditioners” as the most common summertime injury (followed by sunburns among children left inside cars). “To prevent asphyxiation,” reads a warning from the agency in 2007, “timers should be set, wind direction should be rotated and doors should be left open.”
Between 2003 and 2005, the agency reported a total of 20 fan deaths. Its injury surveillance system says it collects data from 66 hospitals and 18 fire stations, as well as from individuals who report incidents through the agency’s hotline and website. The agency did not respond to requests for information about the number of fan deaths and injuries between 2014 and 2015, and the detective division of the Korean National Police Agency says it has not collected statistical data. However, warnings against fans continue—and not just in South Korea. Public Health England published a national plan for heat waves in May 2015, reading, “Fans can cause excess dehydration. The advice is to place fans at a certain distance from people, not aiming it directly on the body and to have regular drinks.” In June, the World Health Organization published a document titled Heatwaves and Health: Guidance on Warning System Development. The section on electric fans reads, “When used inappropriately, electric fans can exacerbate heat stress . . . Fans need to be used with caution and under specific conditions. Generally, the use of electric fans should be discouraged, unless they are bringing in significantly cooler air.”
Earlier this year, academics from the University of Ottawa and the University of Sydney published an article disproving the danger of dehydration by electric fan. They conclude, “Current public health guidelines regarding fan use during heat waves appear flawed.” The authors state that some guidance “partially violates fundamental physical laws” and “exaggerates the increased risk of dehydration with fan use.”
Of course, some South Koreans think the risk of death is just a fantasy. The Chosun Ilbo, a newspaper based in Seoul, published an article in 2014 titled, “Fan Suffocation, True or False?” It determined that an individual would instinctively wake up before suffocating or becoming hypothermic. Dr. Matthew Chin Young Kim, a family physician who grew up in Korea, laughs at the concept of fan death. “Unless the building materials in the room were very toxic, I don’t see how it could happen.” Danny Woo, a 21-year-old South Korean, says fan death is “a ridiculous fairy tale. It’s something parents tell their kids, and the government tells the parents, to get them to turn off the fans.”
Woo could be right. Fear of fan death may help Korea to conserve a vulnerable power supply. The country must import 96 per cent of its energy and, when two of its own power plants closed in 2013, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy reported “unprecedented power shortages.” That summer, the ministry mandated public offices to cut energy consumption by as much as 20 per cent. Reuters once suggested a correlation between the first report of fan death in 1970 and the spike of energy concerns in Korea. However, the fear may have begun right from the advent of electric fans in the early 1900s. By that time, the Buddhist prioritization of the breath and fluctuations in the body had been influencing the culture for 1,500 years.
Samsung Electronics Co., a Korean company, continues to sell fans in South Korea, but all their models sold locally either have built-in clocks or timers to automatically shut off fans. Eunyoung You, an electronic product designer who designs fans for Samsung, explains, “Some people say they have puffy face[s] in the morning if they leave the fan turned on.”
Now that Kang lives in Toronto, where the average July temperature is about five degrees lower than in Seoul, she does not risk using a fan at all. However, as a hairdresser, Kang also worries about the danger of her blowdryer. She cleans it at least once per month to ensure it does not collect bacteria, which she says would make its airflow even more harmful, and she takes heed not to aim in any client’s face. “I use the lowest setting, not for more than 20 minutes,” she says. Kang must watch the clock herself. Even in Korea, hairdryers do not come with timers.
That looks a lot like what was installed in the warehouse at a place where I worked for a while. They had two of them and the brand name on theirs was actually, “Big Ass Fan”, believe it or not. The logo was a picture of a donkey. Must have been invented by a Democrat. They really made it far more tolerable in that area on a hot day.
You forgot to give attribution to the fan company that makes this product..... http://www.bigassfans.com/product/ .....and yes, that is their name.
Theonion.com is getting sneaky posting under another url.
TELL ME ABOUT IT...
I suspect that "most" could be safely and honestly substituted for "some" in that sentence.
When I was in Korea 25 years ago, electric fans were a no-no. The majority of the population (okay, my sample was limited to bars and restaurants that served G.I.s, so it’s likely quite skewed) believed that an electric fan in an enclosed room would suck the air out of the room and cause them to suffocate in their sleep. They would always open a door or window if they ran a fan.
Electric fans kill more people every year than Shark-Nados. True fact. maybe it isn’t Sky Net becoming fully aware that we need to fear, maybe its fans!
It worked, couldn't have been made by a Democrat.
I worked with a mixed race crew, about half Caucasian and half “African American”. We only had one little room where you could get some relief from the heat or the cold. It was of little use to me because the blacks kept setting the thermostat on 80 or even higher summer or winter. Black people in South Carolina seem to consider 80 the ideal temperature, many have actually told me they like an 80 degree day much better than a beautiful, sunny 65 degree spring day. Go in their home in the winter and if you are anything like me you cannot take it, 80 degrees with everything shut up tight and no air movement. It is bad enough in the summer but 80 inside in the winter feels to me like 100 does outside in the summer, sometimes even worse. I can’t breathe in a place like that. I am quite comfortable right now, the air conditioner is on and the temp inside is 77 with a humidity reading of 39. As long as I am not doing anything other than typing on a keyboard that is just fine but if you’re talking about inside temps 72 is way too cold for me in my home in the summer but plenty warm, maybe too warm in the winter.
Based on my experience there 25+ years ago, you'd be wrong.
The only solution is to ban fans or at minimum get a government certified to operate one safely...
If we can save even one life, it will be worth it...!
dr. who had a killer christmas tree....every bit as believable
Ditto’s
Pickles are just as bad, sixty years ago when I was in the sixth grade I knew a lot of people in their fifties and sixties who ate pickles every day. Would you believe that every single one of them is dead now?
There are also several websites that generate white noise and allow the user to set the tone(base/treble) of the white noise.
Everything is fatal. I read somewhere that 100% of people who breathe oxygen are going to die. Horrible.
We once had to spend several days in India with an American lady who insisted she was allergic to: moving air, chilled water, ice, non certified organic vegetables, most all spices, and the list went on. And as a native New Yorker she was an insufferable b!+@% if anybody made the mistake of serving her a prohibited item or mistakenly placed her near a fan or air conditioning. Watching her react to India was memorable and we could never figure out why she came. Some people should not be allowed to have a passport.
I bet some plaintiff attorneys are already preparing late-night TV ads to try and find potential litigants: “Do you know someone who died in a room with an operating electric fan? If so, you could be entitled to compensation....”
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