It seems there is evidence that CO will pass through drywall, thus making the lack of a direct source inside a house less of a risk if there is an indirect source. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1730499 Carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning is a significant US health problem, responsible for approximately 500 accidental deaths annually,1 and a risk of 18% to 35% for cognitive brain injury 1 year after poisoning.2 Most morbidity and mortality from CO poisoning is believed to be preventable through public education and CO alarm use. States have been enacting legislation mandating residential CO alarm installation.3 However, as of December 2012, 10 of the 25 states with statutes mandating CO alarms exempted homes without fuel-burning appliances or attached garages, believing that without an internal CO source, risk is eliminated. This may not be true if CO diffuses directly through wallboard material.
More mandates are always good ideas. We need more mandates. Perhaps a mandate to not grill indoors, a mandate to not point loaded guns at your face, and a mandate to not put the tv in the tub with you?
You do realize that corporate America agrees with you. As much whining as they do, they for the most part encourage mandates. I work for one lobbying organization and a significant portion of my work is for another. The resulting downside of mandates is it squelches innovation.
Of COURSE they do, I can see the manufacturing magnate who makes CO sensors rubbing his palms together in Mr. burns like fashion as I typed it.
Pretty big difference between fire extinguishers, smoke detectors and CO detectors. By the numbers, CO poisoning seems to be a very small number, and when you look at the cases, seems it comes from people who decide to grill indoors while the power is out during a winter storm. Or people who have decided to self- check out in their garage. Over regulation can start to be useless, I think if you are stupid enough to grill indoors, a detector just may not save you. Now if we could mandate not being stupid, that is a good start.
It is an idea to just let the old guys kill themselves off, but the discovery that CO can penetrate wallboard makes it possible those guys can take others with them. Who would want to try to prevent 15,000 emergency department visits and 500 deaths every year anyway? Maybe the other safety mandates were not such a good idea either. Get rid of the "excess population" as Ebenezer Scrooge put it. http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5650a1.htm Unintentional CO exposure accounts for an estimated 15,000 emergency department visits and 500 unintentional deaths in the United States each year (1). <snip> During 1999--2004, CO poisoning was listed as a contributing cause of death on 16,447 death certificates in the United States. Of these, 16,400 (99.7%) deaths occurred among U.S. residents inside the United States, and 2,631 (16%) were classified as both unintentional and non--fire-related deaths. For the period 1999--2004, an average of 439 persons died annually from unintentional, non--fire-related CO poisoning (range: 400 in 1999 to 473 in 2003). The annual average age-adjusted death rate in the U.S. was 1.5 deaths per million persons (Table 1). Death rates were highest for adults aged >65 years and for men (Table 1). Age-adjusted death rates were higher for non-Hispanic blacks and non-Hispanic whites than for other subgroups; however, the difference between the rates for blacks and whites was not statistically significant (Table 1). The average daily number of CO-related deaths was greatest during the months of January (2.07 deaths) and December (1.97 deaths) and lowest during the months of July (0.67 deaths) and August (0.67 deaths). For the period 1999--2004, a total of 35 states had sufficient numbers of CO-related deaths to calculate reliable mortality rates (Table 2). The state with the highest reliable CO mortality rate was Nebraska, and the state with the lowest reliable rate was California. As of December 2007, reporting of acute CO poisoning by health-care providers was mandatory for 13 states; no clear pattern of differences in CO-related mortality was detected between states with mandatory reporting and those without.
