If you have ever fallen asleep in a closed room with an electric fan running, you're lucky to be alive.
That's what many folks in South Korea believe, at any rate, including some government health authorities. The Korean Consumer Safety Board's 2005 Summer Safety Guide listed "asphyxiation from electric fans and air conditioners" as one of the top five summer hazards, with 20 cases reported between 2003 and 2005.
For this reason, most electric fans sold in South Korea are equipped with an automatic shut-off timer, and some even carry a warning: "This product may cause suffocation or hypothermia."
No scientific basis
I know what you're thinking: there couldn't possibly be any scientific basis for this. And you're right. It's a real Korean urban legend, reinforced by many years of media coverage of alleged fan-related fatalities. Even many doctors believe in "fan death," apparently, though some, citing a lack of published research, refuse to believe it.
"There is little scientific evidence to support that a fan alone can kill you if you are using it in a sealed room," Dr. John Linton of Severance Hospital in Seoul told JoongAng Daily in 2004.
"Although it is a common belief among Koreans, there are other explainable reasons for why these deaths are happening." Like other skeptical health professionals, Linton suspects most of the deaths are attributable to pre-existing health conditions that go unreported in media coverage.
"People believe in fan death because -- one -- they see a dead body and -- two -- a fan running," Seoul National University Hospital professor Yoo Tai-woo said in a 2007 interview with Reuters. "But normal, healthy people do not die because they slept with a fan running."
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| From GoneSeoulSearching.com |
JoongAng Daily also contacted a Canadian expert on hypothermia, Gord Giesbrecht, who said he'd never heard of such a thing as fan death. "It's hard to imagine, because to die of hypothermia, [one's body temperature] would have to get down to 28, drop by 10 degrees overnight," he said. "We've got people lying in snowbanks overnight here in Winnipeg and they survive."
Some fan death believers say hypothermia isn't the real culprit anyway. One theory holds that the fan creates a "vacuum" around the face, suffocating the victim. Another holds that running a fan or air conditioner in a closed room causes a build-up of carbon dioxide, also suffocating the victim. Both of these explanations seem to be pseudoscience.
The only 'cure' for fan death is science
Though recent news coverage reveals a slight increase in public skepticism about fan death, the belief still seems to be widely believed in Korean culture. Severance Hospital's John Linton has called for a medical task force to conduct autopsies in fatalities attributed to electric fans to determine the true causes of death. This seems like the best approach -- indeed, the only approach to take -- if the belief in "fan death" is to be eradicated in South Korea once and for all.
Other articles:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fan-death/
http://www.goneseoulsearching.com/2010/10/koreans-believe-in-fan-death.html
https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-11-04/why-every-korean-kid-knows-not-keep-fan-over-night
A list of urban legends:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_legends
Words
Asphyxiation - death from lack of air
Eradicated - eliminated, destroyed
Hazard - danger
Hypothermia - when your body gets very cold for a long time
Once and for all - forever
Pseudoscience - something that sounds like science, but is not based on fact
Skepticism - doubt that something is true
Suffocation - when you cannot breathe
Urban legend - a strange, often incredible story that many people believe.
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