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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
