Featured Review: Electric fans during heatwaves

The Cochrane Review' Electric fans for reducing adverse health impacts in heatwaves 'is being turned to for advice on dealing with recent heatwaves. We talked to lead author, Mike Clarke, to learn if the evidence says that the use of electric fans contribute to or impede heat loss during a heatwave.Why is this Cochrane Review so important? Isn ’t it obvious that electric fans are useful when the weather gets hot?Although it ‘s clear that fans make us feel cooler when the temperature is in the high 20s and 30s °C, and the speed with which they leave the shop shelves as temperatures rise shows this; what’s much less clear is what they do to health generally and, at the extreme, whether they increase or reduce the ch ances of people surviving a heatwave. We did the review to look into this and the studies we identified suggest a need for caution, especially as the temperature rises beyond 35°C. What did you find?After searching through thousands of articles in multiple languages, we were disappointed that there were no high quality comparative trials that would allow us to reliably determine the effects of fans on major health outcomes or survival. However, we did find several other studies that had looked at this during heatwaves, such as the one that led to an additional 30,000 deaths in Europe in the summer of 2003. These studies had mixed results, and the important message is that some of them suggested that using an electric fan might increase the chances of dying ...
Source: Cochrane News and Events - Category: Information Technology Authors: Source Type: news