The worst conflict I’ve ever had with my grandmother happened about five years ago. During my first visit to South Korea, I traveled with my grandmother and stayed with distant relatives up in the countryside. Their home was traditional and modest, with cushions on the ground instead of chairs, and wooden, mattress-less beds accompanied by dense buckwheat pillows. However, the most noticeable feature of the house was the lack of air conditioning. My stay took place in the heat of August, when the Korean summer was in full force, boasting temperatures in the 90s and 100s.
In an attempt to overcome the jetlag and deal with pre-existing difficulties when it came to sleep, I found a small electric fan, which I plugged into the wall and aimed at my bed in order to circulate the air as I slept.
I managed to fall asleep that night despite the uncomfortable wooden bed and pool of sweat that had formed around me, due to my glorious discovery of the fan. However, about an hour later, I woke up to my grandmother vigorously shaking me by the shoulders with a terrified look on her face. She proceeded to tell me I could not fall asleep with the fan on. Curious, I asked her why. She told me that I could die.
I refused to listen, attributing her belief to her old age and deteriorating brain, and so every night became a passive war between me and my grandmother, where I would turn on the fan, sleep, wake up feeling unfathomably hot to discover she had turned it off, turn it back on, rinse and repeat.
I had forgotten about this until very recently. My mother visited my dorm room in Copley, which was not well air-conditioned, so I had a standing fan set up next to my bed which circulated air at all hours of the day. Even my mother, who was born and raised in America and has worked in healthcare all her life, warned me against sleeping with the fan on! When I asked why, she just said it was bad for your health.
At this point, I decided to do some research to test this theory. With just a single Google search, I found a surprising volume of results.
It seems the origin of this myth can be traced back to July 1927, when an article titled “Strange Harm from Electric Fans” was published in the Dong-a Ilbo, a prominent South Korean newspaper. The article argued that the spinning of the electric fans creates a vacuum, which can cause difficulty in breathing as a result of a lack of oxygen, suggesting asphyxiation. The article even goes as far to say that this can cause headaches and even facial nerve palsy.
More articles on the topic were published in Korean newspapers in the following decade. Some suggested that using the fans in the heat drives the heat into the person, causing harm. Others suggested that the wind generated by an electric fan is something similar to that of a storm, and that when this wind comes into contact with the skin, it causes the dissipation of body heat and abnormal blood circulation and therefore chills and bad mood.
Eventually, the sleeping component of this superstition was introduced through the suggestion that prolonged exposure to the “wind” can cause sagging of the skin. Articles started to warn parents against allowing their children to sleep with a fan in the room.
The first recorded case of a “fan death” was published on July 1, 1932 with a simple title translating to “He Died From a Fan,” which described a man who was found dead in the same room as a running fan.
This theory about the dangers of electric fans has managed to work its way into the South Korean ethos in a significant way, with 20 deaths from 2003 to 2005 cited that involved asphyxiations caused by leaving electric fans on while sleeping and the state-funded Korean Consumer Protection Board listing “asphyxiation from electric fans and air-conditioners” as a top five recurring summer accident in 2006. On top of this, deaths with electric fans as the main causal factor were reported by mainstream South Korean news as recently as 2011.
So is there any actual scientific basis to support the idea that electric fans can cause detriment to one’s health or even death? It turns out, yes and no.
Two of the three main proposed causes of fan deaths––hypothermia and asphyxiation––have little to no evidence to support them. Asphyxiation is caused by oxygen displacement and carbon dioxide intoxication and is colloquially known as suffocation. Of course, with absolutely zero ventilation, the amount of oxygen would slowly decrease, and the amount of carbon dioxide would slowly increase, eventually becoming unsustainable for human life. However, this applies to any unventilated space, regardless of if a running fan is present or not.
Hypothermia is the state of having an abnormally low body temperature. While it is true that metabolism slows at night, causing people to be more sensitive to temperature — and therefore more susceptible to hypothermia — this increase in susceptibility is to a minor, almost negligible degree. Investigative autopsies of 10 alleged fan death victims revealed that pre-existing heart problems and alcoholism may have been the culprit for increasing susceptibility to hypothermia.
However, there is also empirical evidence in support of the reasoning, generated by a study with no relation to the South Korean fan deaths. Following several heat waves throughout Europe during the 1980s and 1990s, cities attempted to reduce and prevent heat-related deaths by distributing electric fans in low-income areas. However, when the fans were used in enclosed spaces it seemed to be doing more harm than good, leading the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to release a statement discouraging people from using fans in a closed room without ventilation when the heat index rises above 90 degrees fahrenheit.
Dr. Laurence Kalkstein of the University of Miami, who helped write the EPA’s heat guidelines, stated that fans can create a convection effect when used in temperatures exceeding 90 degrees, as it only blows around hot air, creating opportunity for evaporation in which moisture from the body dissipates at a higher rate, so failure to hydrate can create heat-stress, and in extreme cases, death.
The moral of this story is: 1) There is some basis for electric fan concerns at high temperatures and in closed-off spaces, but not really in any other scenario; and 2) I need to apologize to my grandmother.