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Life Guide U.S. essentials
English

Install smoke alarms; if you burn coal or use gas for heating indoors in winter, add a carbon monoxide alarm

  • High value
  • Evidence B
  • Buys life
  • Costs a little
  • Takes minutes
  • No willpower

In plain words

A working smoke alarm cuts the chance of dying in a house fire by about 60%. 40% of people are asleep when a fire starts, and your nose alone won't wake you. If you burn coal or use gas indoors in winter, add a carbon monoxide alarm. In China in 2018, 11,500 (1.15万) people died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and in the 3 winter months, 70% of those deaths happened at home.

Cost

A smoke alarm costs 30 to 100 CNY. A carbon monoxide alarm costs 50 to 150 CNY. Change the batteries once a year after installing.

What you get

A study in North Carolina looked back at a set of house fires and compared homes where someone died with homes where no one did. Having one working smoke alarm lowered the risk of death by about 60% (OR 0.39; 95% CI 0.18 to 0.83, the plausible range). In the U.S. from 2018 to 2020, among fatal fires in occupied homes, 24% of homes had no smoke alarm and in 41% the people were asleep when the fire started. China reported 11,523 deaths from carbon monoxide poisoning in 2018. Of these, 72.59% in December, 67.42% in January and 66.48% in February happened at home.

Notes

Why grade B: for smoke alarms there is only one study, and it compared homes after the fact rather than randomizing them. There is no study showing that carbon monoxide alarms lower the death rate. The benefit here is inferred from the fact that poisoning deaths cluster in winter and at home.

Evidence grade
B : Supported by research but without a precise number, or based on small or single studies.
Sources
  1. Marshall SW 等 (1998). Fatal residential fires: who dies and who survives? JAMA. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.279.20.1633
  2. USFA (2022). Fatal Fires in Residential Buildings (2018-2020), Topical Fire Report Series 22(2). https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v22i2.pdf
  3. You J 等 (2020). Number of Deaths due to Carbon Monoxide Poisoning by Month and by Place of Death — China, 2018. China CDC Weekly. https://doi.org/10.46234/ccdcw2020.008

Mentioned in

Translated from the Chinese original. Original book, section 1, tip 3. This section is about health and medicines. It is general information, not a substitute for a doctor’s diagnosis or prescription. Content may be out of date and rules differ by place. When you actually deal with an agency, a doctor or a court, follow what local officials, doctors and lawyers tell you. Disclaimer