Recently, it was reported that a woman in Washington, USA, died due to dry ice kept in a car.
According to reports, on 27 July, a 77-year-old woman was found dead in her son's car, in which several containers of dry ice were lying. Her son is an ice cream salesman and had kept four coolers of dry ice in the back of the car. It is believed that his mother died due to suffocation in the smoke of dry ice.
Dry ice is a solid form of carbon dioxide gas, the same gas that we exhale from our bodies when we breathe.
Normal air contains 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and only 0.035% carbon dioxide. If the carbon dioxide in the air exceeds 0.5% then it can be dangerous.
In the normal environment, that is in room temperature, dry ice changes directly from the solid state to gas, a process known as sublimation.
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Have you ever used dry ice? You may not have used it, but you must have seen special effects like smoke from theaters, you may have seen white mist rising in the drinks, there is dry ice here. Dry ice is especially used for freezing and keeping things frozen. It has many medical uses ranging from removing floor tiles. Apart from this, it also has many uses.
According to this report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), because carbon dioxide is odorless and colorless, people who use, transport and store dry ice must be educated about its potential dangers.
A useful website, dryiceInfo.com provides some information related to dry ice:
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