14,000 estimated to have died from humidifier sanitizer scandal: study (2020) | Hacker News Reader

14,000 estimated to have died from humidifier sanitizer scandal: study (2020)

koreatimes.co.kr

55 pointspessimizer14 comments

Humidifiers can get dank in many ways. For clarity, these chemicals weren't used to "sanitize" the air, just the devices themselves.

Implicated chemical is: polyhexamethylene guanidine

Per wikipedia:

> Studies have shown that PHMG in solution has fungicidal as well as bactericidal activity against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria.[2] The substance also has detergent, anti-corrosive, and flocculant properties and prevents biofouling.[3] PHMG-P is a white powdered solid,[1] and as all polyguanidine salts, readily soluble in water.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyhexamethylene_guanidine

I gotta say, the very idea of how this was used sets off alarm bells in my head. They were putting this cleaning agent in the water that was also being aerosolized by the humidifier? At the same time I'm wondering if there are things like this that I / people in the US do that sounds similarly kooky.

Some people don't see issues with this stuff. I dated a girl from Africa for a while, I came home one day to find she was boiling some kind of mopping floor cleaner in one of my cooking pots to scent the house. She got mad at me when I was mad and told her to never do that in my place again and threw the pot away, saying her family does that all the time. I can only imagine what it is they are inhaling.

They were explicitly sold as humidifier sanitizer by "respectable" companies, so people believed it was safe. It's like buying a dish soap - you'd assume that whoever's made the product did the necessary certification to show it won't kill you.

I also bought a bottle of these sanitizer (had two toddlers then), put it into the humidifier a few times, but I was too lazy so that was about it. My laziness probably saved my kids' lives.

There are undoubtedly more things like this waiting to be discovered.

Killing large numbers of people 'statistically' is easy when nobody can identify a direct cause for any individual death. See: air pollutants.

I worry that data privacy laws will slow down the discovery of things like this.

Imagine for example that supermarkets could have said 'oh look, the people that buy this selection of products have a higher chance of hospital admission'.

Except now it's practically illegal for a supermarket (who has product data) do join that with medical records at any reasonable scale. And if you do a study of just a few thousand volunteers, you won't discover something like 'this floor cleaner brand shortens users lifespan by 1 year'.

Instead the problem goes undetected, and tens of thousands or millions die early.

So it was the cleaning agent, not the humidifiers them self, that caused the deaths?

Kinda scary how long it took to uncover this. I wonder how many other products like this are circulating.

I'm fairly confident that something like this wouldn't have been discovered in the USA.

14,000 deaths by asthma like causes spread over 10 years in a population of 300 million is going to disappear into the noise.

There is nobody doing nationwide studies asking 'do people who have a humidifier live shorter lives than those who do not?'. Besides, any results from that question would be hidden behind spurious correlations (humidifiers are maybe owned by the rich, or used only in dryer places where disease profiles are different).

It's hilarious that this is on the front page next to an article about longevity. Simultaneously dreaming of immortality and perfect health while accidentally killing thousands trying to build a humidifier.

Distilled water only in humidifiers, especially the ultrasonic ones. Else, you may be breathing in whatever is in the water.

I was noticing my air quality monitor showing awful AQI after running an ultrasonic cool mist humidifier. Turns out it's the minerals in tap water atomizing into fine dust in the air. I don't know how harmful it actually is but I stopped using it after that.

Bought a warm humidifier and that seems to actually boil the water into steam. You can tell it's not sending the minerals airborne because the minerals leave deposits on the heating element that you have to clean periodically. Still use tap water in it though.

Is distilled water not available?

You can go through gallons of water per day trying to keep some places humidified. At the scale, the cost and annoyance of having to stock up on distilled water gets pretty bad.

Yeah what the other guy said. Keeping my toddler's room humidified at night uses several gallons of water per week, which would be pretty annoying to have to manage over time. Boiling tap water really shouldn't have any health risks, that's exactly how distilled water is made. I'm just skipping the redundant distillation step. I have pretty soft water so I haven't actually had to clean the heating element after 2 years of use.

Based on the source article, this seems like this primarily affected Korea, but this seems like something that could have happened anywhere the humidifier cleaner was sold. Isn't this a much bigger scandal?

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