The availability of electricity as well as the presence of electronic devices which depend on electricity is one of the defining things of the modern era.
The presence of constant power remains a huge issue around the country and many people find themselves to be largely ignorant of its dangers. In many parts of the country, the regular supply of electricity is a complete luxury, while in the advanced countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, electricity is taken for granted. In many ways, therefore, this important contributor to modern life has come to be a ubiquitous presence in our lives.
However, as good as it is, there are obvious hazards. As the use of electricity became widespread around the world in the 19th century, more and more people began to come into contact with materials and wires carrying electricity and storing it in the form of batteries, and this resulted in injuries and deaths.
The most extreme thing it does is that it can kill, and many cases of immediate death following an electric shock are due to the hazardous effects that the current exerts on the heart.
Power used for domestic purposes is delivered at a frequency of 50 or 60 Hertz in every country on the planet. That kind of current is called Alternating Current, and when it flows through the body, it forces the tissues in its path to contract and expand at the same frequency, which is 50 or 60 times per second.
Electricity is produced by the movement of an electric charge. The electric current is determined by the amount of charge that flows through a wire within a specific time interval. Such charges only flow if there is a need to do so and every kind of material has the ability to resist that flow of electrical charge through it.
This property is called electrical resistance. It is weakest for water and that is why a human is at their most vulnerable state when water and electricity mix together in their vicinity.
When electricity passes through the human body, it responds with a shock which depends on the point of contact with the current, the type of tissue and the duration of the contact.
As the skin is the outermost layer of the body, its ability to resist electric current depends on how dry it is. If it is the skin of a mason which is calloused and has a thick layer of dead cells, more resistance is produced and the magnitude of electric current passing through the body is much reduced.
If the skin is wet, as can happen when one is indoors or when a person is out in the rain and there is lightning, the resistance of the skin can drop to a very low level. This produces a local area of burn in the skin, thereby, creating a breach such that a continuously flowing current will increase the skin temperature further and cause a breakdown of the resistance of the skin layer. The skin resistance then further reduces as the amount of voltage now passing through it increases.
Most cases of death following an electric shock occur due to the effects of electricity on the heart. The heart has four chambers. The upper two chambers are called the atria. One is known as an atrium. The left side receives blood from the lungs that is rich in oxygen while the right side receives blood depleted of oxygen from the rest of the body which they pump into the respective ventricles. So, the left ventricle then pumps out the oxygen-rich blood to the body to supply it to the tissues. If it is not able to do this, the left ventricle is described as having failed and this is the most common type of heart failure.
The right ventricle which receives oxygen-depleted blood from the right atrium then pumps this blood into the lungs where it is to be enriched with oxygen and the cycle continues many times per minute and throughout a person’s lifetime.
Inside the heart of every single person, there is a bundle of tissue within the right atrium which drives the electric circuit that ensures the regularity of this process. That specialized tissue is called the sino-atrial node. When an electric current passes through the body, the signal which normally keeps the heart beating in such a regular manner is severely disrupted and leads to the loss of that rhythm. The muscles of the heart stop beating in a synchronized manner and very soon, as the interval between each beat becomes shorter and shorter, there is not enough blood pumped around the body to sustain life because the heart rate increases to a high level. This is known as ventricular fibrillation.
When current flows through muscles, there is an involuntary contraction of the various groups of muscles. If the current flows through the forearms for example, both flexion and extension are competing at the same time and against each other. It is known that the muscles of flexion are more powerful than those for extension but all of them are contracting at the same time so that the arm remains in a contracted state with the fist firmly clenched around the source of the current, thereby causing more extensive damage to the skin and its internal tissueables.
This state is called current-induced tetanus. In the meantime, the cell membranes of the affected tissues become swollen and thus, unable to allow the movement across its walls of all kinds of substances including ions and large molecules like protein materials and others, and permanent damage occurs.
This becomes an irreversible state such that the ion concentration, pH, body temperature and tissue leakage become permanent and cell death results. The exact mechanism of cell death usually varies depending on how large the current is and its duration of contact with membranes and tissues. Therefore, no amount of electricity is to be trifled with since the degree of resistance the body offers varies from one part to another and also between persons.
When these small issues are not taken into consideration, significant tissue injury and even electrocution could be the result and death can ensue very quickly, especially when you are not protected with the right equipment.
Death by electrocution can occur simply by having the insides of a person cooked due to the magnitude of the electric current delivered. The kind of burns sustained by such a person would be first, second and third-degree burns over large areas of the body and there will be fourth-degree burns over the areas where the tissues were roasted.
Such an individual would have lost the grip of whatever they were holding on to and be thrown away from the implement producing the current. If such a person was working at a height, there would be the additional hazard of being thrown from such a point to the ground with its associated risks. Sometimes, the person’s misery is compounded by experiencing such a fall, which could then lead to fractures, head injury, spinal cord injuries and even death.
About 10 years ago, there was this young woman who was then a member of the National Youth Service Corps, and who came inadvertently in contact with a transformer and was flung away from the enclosure with tremendous force. She sustained burns to the upper body and chest and suffered skin loss over a large area of her scalp. Her clothes were partly burnt, and she was taken into an emergency room of a public hospital where she was successfully resuscitated and eventually saved. In many other cases, the victims often do not live to tell their stories.
While these incidents are not common in developed countries, they remain much more so in developing nations where there are even more hazards to cope with such as sudden surges in power in a domain that has become accustomed to being served with low current. It then means that even electrical tools that are properly handled can suddenly become overcharged while still within the grips of an individual who is reasonably well-kitted for what they are doing.
In such circumstances, therefore, it becomes wise to be doubly protected. Another reason for having more casualties in developing nations is the persistence of ignorance and superstition.