Merged Fan Death in Korea

Well, then, it's not the dehydration either, it's the kidney's packing up....
 
BillyJoe said:
It could.

If you are harbouring a virus and your body temperature drops because you go outside with wet hair, those viruses could obtain a foothold because they replicate better at lower temperatures.
(And then your immune system raises your body temperature - by resetting the thermostat in the brain - to help fight the virus.)

There's often a little truth there.
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Unless you have some research here Billy, I suggest you hold off on this conclusion and especially your hypothesis as to the reason.

There were two studies (and maybe a couple more I didn't see) that showed getting one's feet cold resulted in more colds. Both studies had small numbers of test subjects. At least one researcher hypothesized, (based on some other study showing that during respiratory virus outbreaks there were a fair number of asymptomatic infections), that the infections were asymptomatic and the cold feet caused them to become symptomatic.

But those studies are contradicted by a large number of studies that showed exposure to inclement weather and/or cold temperatures had no effect on one's immune system (excluding frostbite of course) or on the number or length of colds one experiences.

As to your hypothesis lower body temperature is more conducive to viral replication, show me the evidence.

About the only thing that is well documented is that cold temperature makes your nose run.
 
Beady said:
The flip side of this are the stories about someone's grandmother, who would open all the windows in the house once a month for an entire day, even in the dead of winter, supposedly to exchange all the air in the house. The stories usually end up something like, "...and no one ever got sick."
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I don't know that once a month is enough but the principle here is actually sound.
 
rjh01 said:
I too, have slept many times with a ceiling fan on above the bed. All windows and doors have been shut.

Am sure many others have too.
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A good ceiling fan on when you sleep can cut down on mosquito bites in the tropics and is the next best thing to a mosquito net for preventing disease. In addition, keeping a fan going around the food you are serving and eating keeps the bacteria carrying flies off the food as well.
 
K-W said:
I have an extremely hard time sleeping without a fan on me year round. Theres certainly some truth to fans causing dehydration. I more or less have to chug a bottle of water in the morning to get my body back in working order, I imagine a person more sensitive to the effects of dehydration would want to avoid having a fan blowing directly on them all night unless they were in an extremely humid environment. But even if someone died of dehydration with a fan contributing to water loss, it wouldn't be fan death, it would be death by dehydration with a fan contributing to the water loss and there would have to be other factors involved.
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Think the physics through here, KW (and the rest of you who bought this).

The fan increases evaporation. Evaporation does not increase sweating, in fact it would have the opposite effect. As the sweat evaporates it carries away heat. You are cooler and sweat less. Once that sweat is outside of your body you've already lost it!!!! So having it then evaporate doesn't make your sweat glands replace it, your body temperature determines how much you sweat.

About all a fan might do is result in you breathing in drier air but you don't get dehydrated simply from 8 hours breathing in dry air.
 
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The dog thing seems silly to me. Even if Koreans eat dogs, so what? It's not like there's anything objectively wrong with it. If we get to call them backwards for eating dogs, do Indians get to call us backwards for eating beef?

Hyparxis said:
We get all worked up about foreign superstitions, and treat our own as natural. It's like all the horrible things some people point to in the Koran or the Hindu Scriprtures while the Bible's God-awful wonders are glossed over.
One man's superstition, is another's proverb.
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Difference is that Christians don't fly planes into buildings. I don't like Christianity, but it's not comparable to Islam.

DonJunbar said:
And it's hilarious to see westerners say "Look at those superstitious people in other cultures! Why can't they be more like my culture, which is totally realistic and doesn't have any weird supersti--hey look, I think I see an image of the Virgin Mary in that puddle!"
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Those sort of people are seen as kooks in mainstream American culture. The impression that I get from this thread is that fan death is accepted truth, and reported on the news. I also get the impression that in India, homeopathy is widely regarded as a completely legitimate form of medicine.

skeptigirl said:
The fan increases evaporation. Evaporation does not increase sweating, in fact it would have the opposite effect. As the sweat evaporates it carries away heat. You are cooler and sweat less. Once that sweat is outside of your body you've already lost it!!!! So having it then evaporate doesn't make your sweat glands replace it, your body temperature determines how much you sweat.

About all a fan might do is result in you breathing in drier air but you don't get dehydrated simply from 8 hours breathing in dry air.
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But are there issues other than sweating? Does a lower humidity of the air mean that your lungs give up more water? Does water leave the skin through osmosis?
 
Art Vandelay said:
...

Difference is that Christians don't fly planes into buildings. I don't like Christianity, but it's not comparable to Islam.
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Not to hijack the thread here but apparently you missed history class when they covered the Crusades. Maybe there weren't any planes back then but that didn't stop the Christians from slaughtering Muslims including children. I believe it was the Muslim conquerer, Suliman who actually conquered the Christians and then didn't slaughter them all, bucking the centuries of tradition.

Art Vandelay said:
...Those sort of people are seen as kooks in mainstream American culture. The impression that I get from this thread is that fan death is accepted truth, and reported on the news. I also get the impression that in India, homeopathy is widely regarded as a completely legitimate form of medicine.
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Hey, half the country still believes Saddam was behind the 9/11 attack so I wouldn't be sitting so high on that horse of yours if I am reading your post correctly.

Not to mention more people in this country don't believe in evolution compared to any other modern country.

Art Vandelay said:
...But are there issues other than sweating? Does a lower humidity of the air mean that your lungs give up more water? Does water leave the skin through osmosis?
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Not enough to result in a fan having any impact on dehydration.
 
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Tried to find this on SNOPES but I couldn't. But I did find this trivia on fan deaths.

The straight dope

wiki

Hilarious blog entry
Fans kill thousands of people each year, but most of the deaths go unreported because the fans were in a different room. It's a little-known fact that the whirling blades cause disturbance in the ether that pervades the universe, and the ripple effect impairs organisms up to 500 feet distant.

This summer, fans killed several of my son's pets. First a stag beetle died when our cat, driven mad by ripples in the ether, overturned the beetle's plastic terrarium and fought the poor beetle to its death. Miraculously, the cat survived. Our eel was not so lucky as the cat. Driven insane by the whirling blades' insidious disturbance of the ether, it managed to flip itself out of its aquarium -- through a tiny hole in the top!! -- and die. We found it on the floor ... shriveled and dry. That could happen to you, too. Since then, two other stag beetles have died. Snails as well. And a goldfish has turned deathly white! Scary.

Miraculously, our cats and children have survived, but we're taking no more chances, especially now that our two fans have begun to alter weather patterns in our apartment. In the past two days, they've actually been blowing cool air at night -- even though there's no air-conditioning unit attached! We think that the fans are now trying to freeze us to death, so we've put them away in a closet, completely covered in a bag zipped carefully shut to prevent them from doing even more damage.

Fans are killers. Why do you think that they're called fans? The word "fan" is short for "fanatic." You can't trust fanatics. Don't trust fans, either.
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I think it is important to consider the factors that go into large segments of the population believing myths before suggesting such hypotheses as it has anything to do with national or ethnic intelligence.

There is this little thing called wealth. We have the luxury of computers and TVs in the majority of households. We have the luxury of sending all our kids to school as opposed to having them quit to work and support the family. There is no excuse for half the people in this country believing in Intelligent Design and Irreducible Complexity. There's no excuse for how many people suck up without question the tripe they are fed every day from the mainstream news. We are not on top of math education surveys, science education surveys, knowledge of geography, lowest infant mortality and so on but we certainly should be.

Harvard grads were interviewed in a study a while back and the majority of them couldn't correctly explain how the seasons occur or what causes the Moon phases. They cited distance from the Earth to the Sun and the Earth's shadow respectively.

I personally don't feel very smug about the intelligence and or education of the American people. The whole JREF movement wouldn't be necessary if critical thinking was actually common place.
 
skeptigirl said:
Not to hijack the thread here but apparently you missed history class when they covered the Crusades.
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And the Inquisition and the Male Maleficarum and the conquest of the New World and... When they got tired of slaughtering or being slaughtered by Muslims, they turned to easier prey like witches, Jews, aboriginals, and so on. The only thing that really stopped them was the skepticism that the Renaissance brought. Nah, Muslims have nothing on Christians in the mass murder department.

I believe it was the Muslim conquerer, Suliman who actually conquered the Christians and then didn't slaughter them all, bucking the centuries of tradition.
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It was Saladin, not Suliman.

Not enough to result in a fan having any impact on dehydration.
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There is no way a fan will cause fatal dehydration while you sleep. If tht is the cause of death (very doubtful), it is more probably caused by the heat that is the reason the fan was on to begin with. Central air conditioners also have fans so why not mass deaths in hotels, hospitals, etc?

I live in Arizona where the relative humidity is usually around 10% and we have fans on all the time. People don't die here from fans. People do die of heat prostration and heat stroke but they usually don't have fans blowing on them when they do that.
 
skeptigirl said:
A good ceiling fan on when you sleep can cut down on mosquito bites in the tropics and is the next best thing to a mosquito net for preventing disease. In addition, keeping a fan going around the food you are serving and eating keeps the bacteria carrying flies off the food as well.
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It's not working all that well in North Carolina of late. I run the ceiling fan at night, have the A/C on, windows closed and still get bit at 2 AM. With the temperatures of late (97 F + high humidity), that's approaching tropical.
 
Actually, there do seem to be a lot of benefits from what people have said here to sleeping with a fan on. Personally I always have, even in the winter when it was -30 outside.

The other day my wife insisted I sleep under a blanket because the fan was on us. She doesn't believe in fan death anymore but she still believes it will give me a stomach ache.
 
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English Teacher in Korea

Greetings from Yeong-Gwang (S. Korea), my little corner of the divinely inspired petri dish.

Mmm, I think the probability of death is relative to the rotation and proximity of the motor with respect to the head of the person in the enclosed environ. Risks are increased if the person involved first suffers from a cardiac arrest, alcohol poisoning, or a case of death while enclosed in the room; This is the only conclusion I can come up with. :cool:
 
How about this:
Temperature above 105F. Humidity near 100%.

Cooling by evaporation won't cool your body under those conditions. Evaporation only works when the air can absorb more moisture. No evaporation, no cooling.

So, you are blowing more hot air onto your body. Effectively, you are heating yourself with the fan you meant to cool yourself with.

So, in the belief that the fan is helping cool you, you sit (or lie) there in your room and die of heat stroke (what's the proper expression for that?) Combination of dehydration and over heating.

Under those conditions, you need to find a way to cool yourself for real. Those conditions will get you anyway. The fan just fools people into sitting still long enough for it to happen, and maybe contributes a little to the heating.
 
MortFurd, by your reasoning we should have had millions of deaths in the Southern U.S. between the advent of the electric fan and the widespread use of air conditioning, but I'm unaware of any statistics bearing that out.
 
I think the flaw in MortFord's argument are the words 'Humidity near 100%.' In reality it will be enough below 100% for humans to keep a steady temperature. A fan will help by ensuring that the air around you is kept below 100% humidity.
 
rjh01 said:
I think the flaw in MortFord's argument are the words 'Humidity near 100%.' In reality it will be enough below 100% for humans to keep a steady temperature. A fan will help by ensuring that the air around you is kept below 100% humidity.
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Yup. That's the question. How high does the humidity have to be, and how high does the room temperature have to be before you have a problem.

I don't know, but I can imagine conditions where it could be a problem. Those (rare) conditions might be a basis for the story.
 
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