It's also worth noting that previous attempts at preventing malaria in Africa have failed not because of any technological limitation, but because they view it completely differently than we do in the West.
As medical anthropologists have consistently found, because malaria is so common in much of sub-Saharan Africa, and because the overwhelming majority of cases go away on their own, most rural Africans consider malaria a minor ailment, the way that Westerners might think of the cold or flu.
I tried the oscillating fan stuff, and got bitten three times in a couple of hours. Guess there are some mosquitoes which can actually fly over a fan's currents.
Local hint: in Spain, we are being invaded by the tiger mosquito[1], which is faster, stronger, and stealthier than regular mosquitoes. They don't care about oscillating fans. So don't trust the fan thingy. I would recommend DEET-based repellents or Autan, which contains Icaridin[2] and has never failed me. I've seen those fuckers hover my legs in rage, unable to land and bite me.
Its saliva causes infection in a large number of individuals, the marks last for 7-14 days[1], and itches as if your leg is on fire. The only remedy is to apply heat[2] and wait for your body to get used to it.
The worst part is that you have to change habits, never lean outdoors if there are mosquitoes, you can't stop have a nice conversation with people on the street without getting your legs bitten, because those fuckers are fast. Even cafe terraces have to install mosquito repellents, because people stop staying outdoors.
In Spain, most houses have an outdoor patio, but people don't use it anymore. It is nice being outside, but the tradeoff is a week of really, really itchy legs (and a possible infection)
It's not fatal, but the pain is way higher than a regular mosquito bite, and it makes you paranoid whenever you are outdoors. God I hate them.
PS: always apply a repellent on your skin before going out
This is a revealing article. I somehow didn't think about, now rather obvious, cultural difference in perception of malaria. I also didn't know that "the overwhelming majority of cases go away on their own". I thought of malaria as a certain death without treatment.
The treated nets did, however, have technological issues, as pointed in the article: "Among other design flaws, their tight mesh blocks ventilation, a serious problem in the hot, humid places where malaria roosts".
Kite patch is simple enough to actually make it work. I just hope it is indeed effective.
Wait a minute - maybe we are being too sensitive to cultural differences here. Do we just accept the culture of sub-Sarahran Africa as equally valid to our own in this case? Do we just accept that Africans don't like using bed nets and so we must discount that approach and look for alternative ways to combat malaria?
Let's not pussy-foot around the issue. The LA Times article mentions that some African people think that mangoes cause malaria - in this case the African view is wrong and the Western view is right. Perhaps it is also wrong to hold the view that (a) malaria is no more harmful than the flu; and (b) having ventilation is preferable to a bed net.
I realise that changing people's attitudes is difficult, particularly when the message is delivered by white people who have such a poor historical record in Africa. But malaria causes a quarter of childhood deaths in sub-Saharan Africa [1] and insecticide-treated bed nets are 90-95+% effective, even when they have small holes [2].
I'm not saying that Western culture is always right - or even right when it comes to malaria. Lets just be careful to avoid automatically excluding other cultural viewpoints from criticism.
The question here, I imagine, is not primarily one of the validity of the various viewpoints. Rather, it is commentary that someone solving the problem of malaria has to accept the reality of the sub-Saharan African viewpoint as a starting point for their approach.
Foundationally, the local populations aren't clamouring for a solution, so they are much less likely to accept inconvenience as a by-product of a solution.
We know rhinovirus and flu kill scores of elderly people in nursing homes, but continue to avoid the minor inconvenience of meticulous hygiene before visiting our geriatric loved ones.
In risk communication, we might say "the audience will be hostile toward our rhetoric". Put another way, the target population will require careful encouragement to changing their viewpoint, while being presented with a solution that does not operate from a confrontational approach.
Any solution that does not consider the local populations' viewpoints will likely fail.
"the overwhelming majority of cases go away on their own" go away for most africans because they are more likely to carry the sickle cell trait which provides defence against malaria.
Still, a square piece of plastic is still more portable than carrying around a 2 liter bottle full of fermenting yeast. I'm not about to strap that to my backpack when I go hiking.
That was interesting, except I don't understand why it calls for a candy thermometer when the highest temperature you are asked to measure is 90 F. The first temperature where sugar does something interesting in candy making is 230 F, and so many candy thermometers don't even go down to 90 F.
Do you know that fans sold in many Asian countries have mandatory automatic shutoff timers? This is due to a deep-rooted and very resilient urban legend that a running fan causes hypothermia in people who sleep in the same room with it and that people die because of that.
Ridiculous. The fan would not do anything that a light bulb of equivalent wattage wouldn't also do.
Someone who asserts that fans can kill people is making an extraordinary claim, and needs to supply extraordinary proof, such as citing a verifiable case where it happened.
It sounds like you haven't read the post I linked to, which explains what fans do that light bulbs don't, cites verifiable cases, and explains the theory.
Your comment, of course, is ridiculous. If a fan didn't do anything a lightbulb didn't do, then why would people buy fans? Lightbulbs are much cheaper!
Similarly, in a heated room without an outside source of airflow, very hot air is constantly pushed directly to your body, which is a far more effective way of raising your body temperature rather than “baking” in hot air. If you get enough of this, you would die – of hyperthermia, or abnormally high body temperature
For the air to actually heat your body enough to kill you, you need:
* Room temperature that is high enough to kill you (>43 degrees celcius). Any temperature below this -- and the fan helps avoid hyperthermia by averaging out the body temperature with the environment.
* You have to be fully dehydrated, otherwise even air hotter than your body will cool you up.
* According to http://www.mherrera.org/temp.htm no place in Korea ever exceeded 40.3 celsius degrees between 2002 and 2012. So if you slept with a fan, during the hottest day of the hottest city in Korea, you'd still not be hot enough to be killed.
If you sleep on on extremely hot days (not nights), with (>43C) a fan directly aimed at you may increase the risk of hyperthermia (which exists anyway). However, on any day with more than 36 degrees Celsius, you are unlikely to leave a fan directed at you, because it will feel warmer than without the fan.
In short, it is a silly urban legend, more likely to cause hyperthermia in people who are afraid to use fans to lower their temperatures during the night.
The linked post is long and rambles a bit, and I only skimmed it, but I've come up empty handed on any actual cases of someone dying from a fan in a closed room, due to heat stress or any other reason. The citations seem to be an EPA pamphlet and an NPR interview, both of which are far from saying that the fans will kill you, and neither of which are “verifiable cases”, or even anything resembling that.
I have slept under this fan for 15 years now and I keep it running almost constantly. It has yet to kill me. It is on at this very moment and I will sleep under it tonight.
I wonder why we haven't see some silly correlation like "breath death." Do you have any idea how many people die shortly after breathing for the last time?
I actually read it a really long time ago, but I just read it again. Let's review how my scenario is like that which allegedly causes fan death:
* I do not open any windows. Ever.
* My fan does not oscillate (it is a ceiling fan).
* I sleep directly under it.
* I have it on all the time.
* We face extreme heat. This is Arizona. It's well over 100 F all summer long, often closer to 110 F. That means 40+ C most of the time, for you metric users.
* The humidity is usually low, so if it kills you via evaporating all your sweat, these conditions should dry you out faster than anything else.
I have done this all summer every summer for some 15 years now. I am still alive. Heat stroke can kill you. "Fan death" will not.
The post you linked to was stupid. I did, in fact, read it, and I feel dumber for having done so. I award its author (and you) -1 point, and may God have mercy on both your souls.
More dramatically, from needing to set your convection oven 50 degrees lower, he gets that there's a 50 degree delta regardless of temperature, and: "This means that although the room’s air temperature is 90 degree Fahrenheit, with a fan on, your body is cooking at the same rate as being in a room with 140 degree Fahrenheit[.]" Of course that is inane - ignoring evaporation, blowing air over an object means the object will more quickly approach the temperature of the air (and vice-versa). Blowing 90 degree air over a 98.6 degree body is cooling the body, and cooling it faster than static 90 degree air, even if there is no sweat.
I have no doubt that there is a point at which moving air as opposed to static would cause hyperthermia faster, but it quite obviously needs the air temperature to be above body temperature and actually even above the temperature the body needs to reach for hyperthermia to become an issue. It probably needs to be even higher than that, because of sweat, but I don't have an easy way of working out how much higher. At these temperatures, we would likely be seeing deaths from heat stroke without a fan amongst the susceptible population.
None of this disproves fan death, but that article is not at all credible proof.
Well, true in the sense of the way most koreans talk about it is not the case.
Fan death is true in as much as if you blow air hotter than 37 degrees over a dehydrated body that (for whatever reason) can't wake up, you could potentially have trouble. Then again, I don't think it's particularly controversial that blowing hot air over someone who can't wake up might cause them damage. That's not the same as saying that the Korean idea of fan death is true.
Exactly. This one's a pretty easy experiment to duplicate. I always sleep with a fairly strong oscillating fan blowing across me, and whenever a mosquito gets in the house and I can't kill it before I need to go to bed, I wake up with mosquito bites.
I've seen fans firsthand in SE Asia deployed for this reason and I can confirm it really does not work at all. They do cool you down though. Stop propagating this myth people, it does nothing. Especially in SE Asia with their aggressive mosquitos.
Comments
Just use an oscillating fan.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/science/a-low-tech-mosquit...
It's also worth noting that previous attempts at preventing malaria in Africa have failed not because of any technological limitation, but because they view it completely differently than we do in the West.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/02/opinion/la-oe-shah-2...
I tried the oscillating fan stuff, and got bitten three times in a couple of hours. Guess there are some mosquitoes which can actually fly over a fan's currents.
Local hint: in Spain, we are being invaded by the tiger mosquito[1], which is faster, stronger, and stealthier than regular mosquitoes. They don't care about oscillating fans. So don't trust the fan thingy. I would recommend DEET-based repellents or Autan, which contains Icaridin[2] and has never failed me. I've seen those fuckers hover my legs in rage, unable to land and bite me.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aedes_albopictus
[2] http://www.scjohnson.co.uk/nqcontent.cfm?a_name=Autan.uk-FAQ...
That same species is just now invading Silicon Valley:
http://belmont-ca.patch.com/groups/editors-picks/p/deadly-as...
Sorry man, you'd better start preparing.
Its saliva causes infection in a large number of individuals, the marks last for 7-14 days[1], and itches as if your leg is on fire. The only remedy is to apply heat[2] and wait for your body to get used to it.
The worst part is that you have to change habits, never lean outdoors if there are mosquitoes, you can't stop have a nice conversation with people on the street without getting your legs bitten, because those fuckers are fast. Even cafe terraces have to install mosquito repellents, because people stop staying outdoors.
In Spain, most houses have an outdoor patio, but people don't use it anymore. It is nice being outside, but the tradeoff is a week of really, really itchy legs (and a possible infection)
It's not fatal, but the pain is way higher than a regular mosquito bite, and it makes you paranoid whenever you are outdoors. God I hate them.
PS: always apply a repellent on your skin before going out
[1] http://www.azbowserfamily.com/images/72907mosquito.jpg
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3257884/ (however, I just dip a spoon on hot water and apply it against the bite for some seconds)
This is a revealing article. I somehow didn't think about, now rather obvious, cultural difference in perception of malaria. I also didn't know that "the overwhelming majority of cases go away on their own". I thought of malaria as a certain death without treatment.
The treated nets did, however, have technological issues, as pointed in the article: "Among other design flaws, their tight mesh blocks ventilation, a serious problem in the hot, humid places where malaria roosts".
Kite patch is simple enough to actually make it work. I just hope it is indeed effective.
Wait a minute - maybe we are being too sensitive to cultural differences here. Do we just accept the culture of sub-Sarahran Africa as equally valid to our own in this case? Do we just accept that Africans don't like using bed nets and so we must discount that approach and look for alternative ways to combat malaria?
Let's not pussy-foot around the issue. The LA Times article mentions that some African people think that mangoes cause malaria - in this case the African view is wrong and the Western view is right. Perhaps it is also wrong to hold the view that (a) malaria is no more harmful than the flu; and (b) having ventilation is preferable to a bed net.
I realise that changing people's attitudes is difficult, particularly when the message is delivered by white people who have such a poor historical record in Africa. But malaria causes a quarter of childhood deaths in sub-Saharan Africa [1] and insecticide-treated bed nets are 90-95+% effective, even when they have small holes [2].
I'm not saying that Western culture is always right - or even right when it comes to malaria. Lets just be careful to avoid automatically excluding other cultural viewpoints from criticism.
[1] http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...
[2] http://www.againstmalaria.com/faq_bednets.aspx
The question here, I imagine, is not primarily one of the validity of the various viewpoints. Rather, it is commentary that someone solving the problem of malaria has to accept the reality of the sub-Saharan African viewpoint as a starting point for their approach.
Foundationally, the local populations aren't clamouring for a solution, so they are much less likely to accept inconvenience as a by-product of a solution.
We know rhinovirus and flu kill scores of elderly people in nursing homes, but continue to avoid the minor inconvenience of meticulous hygiene before visiting our geriatric loved ones.
In risk communication, we might say "the audience will be hostile toward our rhetoric". Put another way, the target population will require careful encouragement to changing their viewpoint, while being presented with a solution that does not operate from a confrontational approach.
Any solution that does not consider the local populations' viewpoints will likely fail.
"the overwhelming majority of cases go away on their own" go away for most africans because they are more likely to carry the sickle cell trait which provides defence against malaria.
Rather hard to carry an oscillating fan around with you at all times.
You could just make your own(very effective) trap with household ingredients: http://www.thriftyfun.com/tf22399231.tip.html
Still, a square piece of plastic is still more portable than carrying around a 2 liter bottle full of fermenting yeast. I'm not about to strap that to my backpack when I go hiking.
That was interesting, except I don't understand why it calls for a candy thermometer when the highest temperature you are asked to measure is 90 F. The first temperature where sugar does something interesting in candy making is 230 F, and so many candy thermometers don't even go down to 90 F.
This was discussed on HN last week [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6051856
A fan. Seems totally logical and wondering why I didn't think of this myself. Also, why is this not more common knowledge?
Do you know that fans sold in many Asian countries have mandatory automatic shutoff timers? This is due to a deep-rooted and very resilient urban legend that a running fan causes hypothermia in people who sleep in the same room with it and that people die because of that.
Well, I didn't know fans are sold with mandatory automatic shutoff timers but I have heard the urban legend.
Not hypothermia, but "fan death", and it turns out to be true: http://askakorean.blogspot.com.ar/2009/01/fan-death-is-real....
Ridiculous. The fan would not do anything that a light bulb of equivalent wattage wouldn't also do.
Someone who asserts that fans can kill people is making an extraordinary claim, and needs to supply extraordinary proof, such as citing a verifiable case where it happened.
It sounds like you haven't read the post I linked to, which explains what fans do that light bulbs don't, cites verifiable cases, and explains the theory.
Your comment, of course, is ridiculous. If a fan didn't do anything a lightbulb didn't do, then why would people buy fans? Lightbulbs are much cheaper!
For the air to actually heat your body enough to kill you, you need:
* Room temperature that is high enough to kill you (>43 degrees celcius). Any temperature below this -- and the fan helps avoid hyperthermia by averaging out the body temperature with the environment.
* You have to be fully dehydrated, otherwise even air hotter than your body will cool you up.
* According to http://www.currentresults.com/Weather-Extremes/hottest-citie... you won't find any place in the world where the night time temperature is well above 30 degrees, so Fan Death is a total myth.
* According to http://www.mherrera.org/temp.htm no place in Korea ever exceeded 40.3 celsius degrees between 2002 and 2012. So if you slept with a fan, during the hottest day of the hottest city in Korea, you'd still not be hot enough to be killed.
If you sleep on on extremely hot days (not nights), with (>43C) a fan directly aimed at you may increase the risk of hyperthermia (which exists anyway). However, on any day with more than 36 degrees Celsius, you are unlikely to leave a fan directed at you, because it will feel warmer than without the fan.
In short, it is a silly urban legend, more likely to cause hyperthermia in people who are afraid to use fans to lower their temperatures during the night.
The linked post is long and rambles a bit, and I only skimmed it, but I've come up empty handed on any actual cases of someone dying from a fan in a closed room, due to heat stress or any other reason. The citations seem to be an EPA pamphlet and an NPR interview, both of which are far from saying that the fans will kill you, and neither of which are “verifiable cases”, or even anything resembling that.
I have slept under this fan for 15 years now and I keep it running almost constantly. It has yet to kill me. It is on at this very moment and I will sleep under it tonight.
I wonder why we haven't see some silly correlation like "breath death." Do you have any idea how many people die shortly after breathing for the last time?
It sounds like you also haven't read the post I linked to.
I actually read it a really long time ago, but I just read it again. Let's review how my scenario is like that which allegedly causes fan death:
* I do not open any windows. Ever. * My fan does not oscillate (it is a ceiling fan). * I sleep directly under it. * I have it on all the time. * We face extreme heat. This is Arizona. It's well over 100 F all summer long, often closer to 110 F. That means 40+ C most of the time, for you metric users. * The humidity is usually low, so if it kills you via evaporating all your sweat, these conditions should dry you out faster than anything else.
I have done this all summer every summer for some 15 years now. I am still alive. Heat stroke can kill you. "Fan death" will not.
The post you linked to was stupid. I did, in fact, read it, and I feel dumber for having done so. I award its author (and you) -1 point, and may God have mercy on both your souls.
That article makes quite a few mistakes.
For one, we don't "run out of sweat", says PopSci (http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-01/fyi-how-much-c...).
More dramatically, from needing to set your convection oven 50 degrees lower, he gets that there's a 50 degree delta regardless of temperature, and: "This means that although the room’s air temperature is 90 degree Fahrenheit, with a fan on, your body is cooking at the same rate as being in a room with 140 degree Fahrenheit[.]" Of course that is inane - ignoring evaporation, blowing air over an object means the object will more quickly approach the temperature of the air (and vice-versa). Blowing 90 degree air over a 98.6 degree body is cooling the body, and cooling it faster than static 90 degree air, even if there is no sweat.
I have no doubt that there is a point at which moving air as opposed to static would cause hyperthermia faster, but it quite obviously needs the air temperature to be above body temperature and actually even above the temperature the body needs to reach for hyperthermia to become an issue. It probably needs to be even higher than that, because of sweat, but I don't have an easy way of working out how much higher. At these temperatures, we would likely be seeing deaths from heat stroke without a fan amongst the susceptible population.
None of this disproves fan death, but that article is not at all credible proof.
Well, true in the sense of the way most koreans talk about it is not the case.
Fan death is true in as much as if you blow air hotter than 37 degrees over a dehydrated body that (for whatever reason) can't wake up, you could potentially have trouble. Then again, I don't think it's particularly controversial that blowing hot air over someone who can't wake up might cause them damage. That's not the same as saying that the Korean idea of fan death is true.
Because it doesn't actually work.
Exactly. This one's a pretty easy experiment to duplicate. I always sleep with a fairly strong oscillating fan blowing across me, and whenever a mosquito gets in the house and I can't kill it before I need to go to bed, I wake up with mosquito bites.
I've seen fans firsthand in SE Asia deployed for this reason and I can confirm it really does not work at all. They do cool you down though. Stop propagating this myth people, it does nothing. Especially in SE Asia with their aggressive mosquitos.