Except in Korea. FanDeath.net. Heh.
And no, fans don’t kill people. They may make a room cold, or somehow set up conditions which bring on heart attacks or strokes or other things, but there’s no way in hell that fans kill people, any more than sex kills old men because it excites them enough to give them a heart attack. We don’t call that “Sex Death”, do we? Ah, well, maybe in Korean it is called Sex Death, I don’t know. In which case, if the cause of death is ascribed to the catalyst of the physical crisis—the stroke, heart attack, blown-out aneurism, or whatever.
Still, if that’s the case, I’d like to see even one Death Certificate that reads, Cause of Death: Fan Death. And another that reads, “Sex Death” or “Soju Death” for the guy whose liver cirrosis causes his death, or “Cigarette death” for the lung cancer victim, or… well, you get the idea. I am pretty sure nothing of the sort will ever be produced, though; or, at least I hope no doctor would ever write that on a Death Certificate. Anyway, the term is unknown outside of Korea, so as far as I can tell, it’s simply a local urban legend spurred on by reporters with the result that it’s so universal it’s almost everywhere accepted as the truth.
See, before I clicked the link I thought this would be about people getting sucked into jet engines by accident.
How ironic I just finished a long winded report on fan deaths not 5/6 days ago.
And yes fans do kill people, if they are attached to a turbine or if you smash your face to close to one.
Hahaha, okay, but those are engine turbines. Fan death = house fans killing people. I suppose it’s possible as a violent death, if you fall into a nice big powerful fan, but not the kind of thing that happens in your sleep…
Koreans often died from fan-related (?) accidents, according to a local MBC news: http://www.samna.co.kr/mbcnews/mbc219.htm.
BTW, this is written in Korean.
I tried reading that report, but it’s still a little above my level, June. Can I ask, does the report imply that the fans caused the death, or that conditions caused by the use of the fan contributed to things like heart attacks or what have you?
One of the points I was raising was that the media actually reports on “fan deaths” as if it were real, and this causes people to believe it is real… which is something that sounds pretty bizarre considering I’ve heard the term “fan death” emerge from no other country in the world, though almost every country in the world has people using fans during the summer.
Perhaps this article is more balanced in its coverage. I do have to wonder why I hear so many pseudo-scientific theories about the mechanics of fan death: it removes the oxygen from the room, uses up the oxygen, or what have you. Those are patently impossible, you see. They cannot happen.
This is what I wrote about it…
http://www.gumbi.ca/glog.asp#104