![]() Another example of lethal danger from wattage would be flash or explosion. The wattage necessary to do that is rarely/never mentioned because it would depend on how long you were locked on and wouldn't really be a useful figure. ![]() The wattage itself is still a danger in that when you lose muscular control you can't separate yourself from the circuit, so there are cases where people die by cooking. This amount is specced in current rather than wattage because the lethal current would have different wattages and voltages with different paths of travel across the body. The two lowest power/current ways to kill a human are defibrillation and brain damage, and 100mA AC is roughly the amount of current that is likely to stop a heart. It deserves and commands a great deal of respect. ![]() If anybody really NEEDS the gory details, I'd be happy to discuss it further, but really? Electricity can be very dangerous when not well understood. Let's suffice to say, there are simply too many reasons that electricity can kill you to blame it on one phenomenon. for obvious reasons, but there is a good reason that you should NEVER put your hand into a Jacobs Ladder, no mater how thick your rubber boots are. I'm not going to discuss explosive vaporization of tissue. Sometimes you can survive these incidents, sometimes you can't. This can happen at the gap between the two sides of a button battery lodged in your esophagus (some excruciatingly sad stories can be told of that). Electroporation causes your cells to become "leaky", so parts like sodium and potassium pumps can't do their jobs anymore and the cell either enters apoptosis or necrosis if it doesn't just fall apart first. I'm sure you can imagine why people don't like talking about those. Other issues can arise from less spoken about effects like electroporation of cell membranes and explosive vaporization of tissues. This is caused mostly by AC circuits disturbing the regular rhythms of the heart and can be cause by as little as 10mA across the chest cavity as you suggest. Probably the most popular one to talk about is cardiac fibrillation. There is more than one reason that electricity can kill you.
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