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Korean Job Discussion Forums
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Hwajangsil Ajumma
Joined: 02 May 2005
Location: On my knees in the stall
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 Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 1:03 am Post subject: |
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Eight decades of kimchi consumption have left me impervious to AIDS, bird flu, smallpox, river blindness, polio, impotence and the common cold.
But those fans...nothing can save you. NOTHING!
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Every day new bed |
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plokiju
Joined: 15 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2005 4:21 am Post subject: |
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| I thought I'd put the timer on my electric fan when I went to bed the other night. It turn out that *gasp* I didn't. I woke up and my fan was still on and I was *gasp* still alive. I must be one of the lucky ones. I could've been minutes from death. |
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The Great Wall of Whiner
Joined: 24 Jan 2003
Location: Middle Land
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coolsage
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Location: The overcast afternoon of the soul
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| Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2005 4:11 am Post subject: |
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| Don't know if there's another race on the earth that lives in such fear of their environment. The sky mists up, the umbrellas come out. The sun comes out, the umbrellas come out. The air/con fires up, the windows open. In the winter when the heat comes on, the doors open. If not for kimchi, no doubt these people would be dropping dead in the street. |
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PaperTiger
Joined: 31 May 2005
Location: Ulaanbataar
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| Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2005 12:06 am Post subject: Unique to Korea??? |
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| Does fan death happen anywhere except Korea? |
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Grotto
Joined: 21 Mar 2004
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| Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2005 12:52 am Post subject: |
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| Fan death is a total bunch of hogwash! Why I am sitting here in front of my computer with the fan on and nothing has happened to meeeeeeeeeeeeee.............ack~! |
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pegpig
Joined: 10 May 2005
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| Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2005 4:06 am Post subject: |
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If you're really concerned about fan death - perhaps you have a small room or are sleeping with 5 people in cramped quarters, do what I do. Slap a few leaves of kimchi on the front of the fan. Turn the fan on full blast so that the kimchi flaps in the wind. Not only will you sleep like a rock (and survive) but you'll probably add 10 years to your life just from having the kimchi wafting over your hairy naked body all night long. Just one of a number of kimchi secrets I have acquired.
P.S. You may have to do some washing the next morning (walls, bedding, body, etc.). But, think about the years you're adding. |
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Bulsajo
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2005 7:21 pm Post subject: |
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| sonofthedarkstranger wrote: |
| It helps to fill your room with plants--lots of em--to replace some of the oxygen that the fan sucks out, I find. But I can't stress the importance of quantity enough--fans really are insatiable in their hunger for oxygen. You really need to be sleeping in a indoor jungle. |
I find that every night I have to grab a fistful of my abundant vegetation and really wring some extra O2 out of 'em before I go to sleep, just to be on the safe side.
And dammit- from now on I'm not buying any more cacti! |
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Butterfly
Joined: 02 Mar 2003
Location: Kuwait
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| Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2005 10:35 pm Post subject: |
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Isn't this discussion a little passe? An urban myth made of an urban myth?
Anyway,
Keepin' it RealReality.
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/200409/22/200409222123324579900091009101.html
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Newspapers fan belief in urban myth
Another stiflingly hot summer has come and gone in Korea, and with it, the risk of dying by electric fan.
If you've never heard of death by electric fan, you're probably not from here. Every summer, mainstream Korean newspapers carry reports of people dying after sleeping in a room with the electric fan on and the doors and windows closed.
A search of the JoongAng Ilbo's archives reveals stories about fan death dating back to the early 1970s. A July 9, 1973, story describes how a 20-year-old man was found dead in the morning after going to sleep with two fans turned on and the room's windows and door shut. The story also describes a mysterious jar of chemicals found in the room but does not explain what it was.
A wider search of Korean newspapers shows that each summer from 1990 to 2004, about 10 stories related to someone dying in the presence of an electric fan were published. Some of the deaths were chalked up to electrical failure of the fan and related fires, but many of them said the victims died from suffocation or hypothermia because the windows and doors were closed.
The debate rages on Internet bulletin boards frequented by confused English teachers and other foreigners who have been warned by Korean friends about the hazards of fans. On one message board, a writer, whose nationality is unknown, postulates that because Korean buildings are built primarily from concrete, oxygen is not easily diffused from small rooms. Others say some fans create an air current that seals the room, driving oxygen to the ceiling and carbon dioxide toward the floor, suffocating the person inside.
In an e-mail interview with the IHT-JoongAng Daily, Dr. Yeon Dong-su, dean of Kwandong University's medical school, who has investigated some cases of "fan deaths," refuted some of the wilder theories but insisted fan deaths do occur.
"Many people say that these victims die from lack of oxygen, but that is not true," Dr. Yeon wrote. "Hypothermia does not only occur in the winter when it is cold. The symptoms can also take place if a person has been drinking and turns on a fan in a closed room. Most people wake up when they feel cold, but if you are drunk you will not wake up, even if your body temperature drops below 35 degrees Celsius (95 F), at which point you can die from hypothermia.
"It doesn't matter so much about the temperature of the room," he continued. "If it is completely sealed, then in the current of an electric fan, the temperature can drop low enough to cause a person to die of hypothermia."
Gord Giesbrecht, a physical education professor at the University of Manitoba in Canada, is a leading expert on hypothermia. He said he has never heard of fan death or anything like it.
"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. We've got people lying in snowbanks overnight here in Winnipeg and they survive," he said.
Is it possible to get hypothermia from a fan? "Maybe if someone was elderly and they were sitting there for three days," he said. "Someone is not going to die from hypothermia because their body temperature drops two or three degrees overnight; it would have to drop eight to 10 degrees."
He added that the only way to verify whether someone had really died of hypothermia during the night would be to take a core body temperature the following morning. Waiting three days while the body was in the morgue wouldn't work because the corpse's temperature can drop during that time, he said.
Many in Seoul's foreign community are also skeptical. Dr. John Linton at Yonsei's Severance Hospital, who attended medical school at the university, is the only non-Korean licensed to practice medicine in the nation.
"There are several things that could be causing the fan deaths, things like pulmonary embolisms, cerebral vascular accidents or arrhythmia," said Dr. Linton. "There is little scientific evidence to support that a fan alone can kill you if are using it in a sealed room. Although it is a common belief among Koreans, there are other explainable reasons for why these deaths are happening."
What is especially important, he said, is the need for autopsies when an unusual death occurs. "There should be a task force set up to look into these fan deaths, and explain them," he said.
So if there's minimal scientific evidence to back the theory behind electric fan deaths, then why does the urban myth persist in Korea?
Dr. Lee Yoon-song is a professor at Seoul National University's medical school and works with the school's Institute of Scientific Investigation. He has conducted autopsies on some of the people who have been described in Korean media as having succumbed to fan death.
"When someone's body temperature drops below 35 degrees, they do start to lose judgment ability," he said. "So if someone was hiking and later found dead, that could be part of the reason. But we can't really apply this to fan accidents. I found most of the victims already had some sort of disease like heart problems or serious alcoholism. So hypothermia is not the main reason for death, but it may contribute."
Dr. Lee blamed the Korean media for the persistence of the urban myth. "Korean reporters are constantly writing inaccurate articles about death by fan, describing these deaths as being caused by the fan. That's why it seems that fan deaths only happen in Korea, when in reality these types of deaths are quite rare.
"They should have reported the victim's original defects such as heart or lung disease, which are the main cause of death [in these cases]," Dr. Lee said. "If a Western doctor investigated these deaths, he would say what really caused the death, and say that a fan was beside the victim."
Ken Kaliher would agree. He has lived in Korea for 33 years, since he first came with the Peace Corps. A collector of off-the-wall news stories, he heard about fan deaths when he first arrived in Korea. But he's never heard of them in any of the many countries he's visited, he said.
"If a story appears in the newspaper, it generally won't get a skeptical response from Koreans," Mr. Kaliher said. "Koreans also tend to believe anything a doctor tells them. They don't usually ask doctors questions."
Ms. Noh, a 20-something who works in the Seoul Metropolitan Education Office, said she learned about fan death from the articles she read every summer. "It's not something we're scared of, but we do think it's weird or abnormal."
Did she ever have a brush with fan death?
"I tried it once, and nothing happened," she said, laughing. "But maybe it's because I had a small fan." |
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pegpig
Joined: 10 May 2005
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2005 6:16 pm Post subject: |
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Well, the wife and I just saw a news story about 3 fan deaths last night. Sorry, no links or further details. We don't talk about fan death around here. It just causes ugly scenes.
Just to let you know when you go to sleep at night it may not be good enough just to turn off the fan. You may have to unplug it and toss it in the closet (wardrobe, if you've been here too long).
Sweet dreams!  |
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Plume D'ella Plumeria
Joined: 10 Jan 2005
Location: The Lost Horizon
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2005 7:48 pm Post subject: |
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And in a related vein, what's all this I'm hearing about A/C death? Yes, my landlady swears up and down that when I run the air-conditioner, the window MUST be open. Otherwise, I will be the victum of air-conditioner death.
Makes perfect sense to me... |
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kermo
Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Location: Eating eggs, with a comb, out of a shoe.
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2005 8:43 pm Post subject: |
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I knew that my air conditioner had a timer on it, but I hadn't a clue as to why my office fan wasn't working until my co-teacher showed me that the timer had run out.
Apparently 180 minutes is the maximum allowable fan-time. Where did they get this number? |
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Dan
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Sunny Glendale, CA
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2005 8:44 pm Post subject: |
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| Wait, what about DHA? I thought it was crock too, but baby foods in the US also advertise DHA content. |
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batman
Joined: 24 Jan 2003
Location: Oh so close to where I want to be
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| Posted: Thu Jul 21, 2005 7:41 pm Post subject: |
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Actually I found this story in Maclean's magazine.
I guess fan death has made its way to Canada.
"Fans are a double-edged sword. They should only be used wit the windows open to blow cooler air in or warmer air out. If the windows are closed, fans can actually heat the air up and accelerate the onset of heat exhaustion."
Also heard about air-conditioner death during my first year in Korea.
The school I worked in would crank the a.c. but then have the gopher run around the building opening all the windows and doors so that we might not suffer any ill-effects.
Could always hear the voice of my long-dead father exclaiming "I'm not paying to cool the outdoors". |
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uberscheisse
Joined: 02 Dec 2003
Location: japan is better than korea.
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| Posted: Thu Jul 21, 2005 8:57 pm Post subject: |
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fan death to me equals a coroner who is as lazy (and likely underpaid) as a korean cop.
"what? he had a history of hypertension, cancer and cirrhosis? hmm... but his fan was on. case closed. next!" |
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