Korean fan death - could there be ANYTHING to it?

Mrs TLW has at least one fan running in the house at any time of the day - and sometimes multiple fans. she also tends to leave all the windows open once it hits 50 degrees out.(10C) - which explains why I have been known to get home from work and put my jacket on.

some days I swear I could remove all variable controls from her life and replace them with a two position switch and it would not make a difference - her truck climate control is either on max heat defrost or max aircon, never anything in between.

I hate it. I sleep with the covers pulled up to my chin and try to tune out the racket. I tried earplugs, but they are more annoying than the background noise. its particularly bad in the winter when the cold draft makes anything exposed hurt.

addendum: on the other hand - I frequently forget my tinnitus completely. my metric for the house being quiet is "so quiet I can hear my ears ringing."

The only thing I can think of would be a situation in which a fan was so covered in allergens or irritants that it spread a cloud through the room when active.

Even then, we'd be looking at a severe allergic reaction, the one-in-a-million kind.

Not being used to such high temperatures and a constantly running fan/airconditioner, I got both pneumonia and laryingitis more than once while I was in Iraq - in 104-122 degree heat (40-50C). Seemed like the dumbest thing ever, but the combination of me sweating my behind off, throwing off the covers at night and the fan/airconditioner having to run to make the temperature even remotely bearable made me sick a couple of times.

I've had that happen at home too once or twice. Evening temp at around 80F (26C) with high humidity, turn the fan on. Night temp drops to around 55-60F and the fan's still going, but I'm asleep and don't notice the cold until the next morning when I wake up with a sore throat and aching joints.

So yeah. There is a way that a fan might contribute to an unhealthy environment.

I'm kind of sensitive to cold, so I used to do the same thing, blasting the radiators in my apartment on full power. Found out pretty quickly that if I did that, I'd have to put on insane amounts of clothes when heading outdoors in order to maintain a temperature close to what I had inside, or I'd get sick from the temperature difference.

These days I just tend to warm up the house to around 60F and put more clothes on when I'm inside, instead of walking around in a T-shirt all the time. The temperature plummet from inside to outside isn't as extreme this way, so I don't have to put that many extra layers on when I head out. A thick jacket, boots, gloves and a fleece cap will do the trick just fine. I'm hardly ever sick anymore during the winter and our heating bill is way down.

Maybe you should pass that on to your mom.

Bad wiring causing a fire, or at least smoldering the insulation, resulting in a build up of toxic smoke which would be directed at the sleeper?

Carbon monoxide or gas leaking from badly maintained gas heaters could be another theoretical problem. A fan would keep the air circulating, rather than allowing it to settle, which could raise the concentration of the gas to potentially lethal levels close to where someone's head was resting while sleeping rather than the gas being closer to the floor.

Based on the specific comments she's made, I'm wondering if she hasn't lost so much weight that it's affecting her body's ability to regulate its temperature.



(In contrast, I'm pretty much a polar bear. Between my bulk and my body hair, I run a lot hotter than a normal person. This means that I handle the weather outside as if it was 10 - 20 F warmer than it really is. I wear short sleeves virtually year-round, and can wear shorts about 10 months out of the year.)

Apparently the temperature of the human body does indeed drop when asleep, but the body is still capable of thermoregulation so this is unlikely to be a problem. In theory it *could* cause problems for some people, but the number would be so small as to be untestable.

www.sleepdex.org/thermoregulation.htm (This discusses things is a fair amount of detail, and is supported by a lot of other sources in so far that human body temperature does indeed drop during sleep)

Doesn't that make Texas a very uncomfortable place for you to live in the summer?

I know I suck at handling heat, so if I'm ever visiting the US, I wouldn't go anywhere south or west of Utah between the start of april and the end of august.