"Beep!"

The baby's face, barely the size of an adult palm, turned blue. The oxygen saturation level displayed on the screen dropped rapidly towards zero. The nurses in the ward gathered to the baby's side. "Please save our Wu-gyeong!" The baby's mother cried. She suddenly stood up and headed toward the humidifier. She filled the humidifier, which had just been washed, with water and a humidifier sterilizer. The mother pulled the end of a thick hose from where the vapor came out and placed it close to Wu-gyeong's mouth. "We need to get rid of the bad germs for our Wu-gyeong to live!"

On May 23, 2004, Wu-gyeong came into this world thirteen weeks earlier than scheduled and faced countless crises like the one described above. She weighed less than a kilogram at birth. "Will our baby be okay?" her parents asked. The doctor answered, "She's a little small, but she's healthy. Let's have her grow a few months more in the hospital and then have her go home." Small Wu-gyeong's breathing was unstable. They decided to have her stay in the intensive care unit (ICU) on a respirator until her breathing stabilized. The doctor pointed to a humidifier in the corner of the ICU and said, "The humidifier helps her breathe, so keep it on at all times." "Okay, doctor." The nurse attached and fixed a pink hose to the humidifier. She placed it so that the moisture would come out just in front of Wu-gyeong's nose.

Wu-gyeong's mother went to a major supermarket to buy things she needed in the ward. There was a product displayed with the label, "Humidifier Mate: A Sterilizer Exclusively for Humidifiers." "A dangerous bacteria called, staphylococcus lives in humidifiers." She recalled the words she once heard on the news. She placed three or four bottles of Humidifier Mate into her cart. As soon as she returned to the hospital, she washed the water tank of the humidifier with dishwasher. She then filled the tank with water and added Humidifier Mate using the lid.

The doctor who had been observing her said, "Please, take care to keep the humidifier on at all times." She used about two bottles of the humidifier disinfectant a month.

Three months passed. Wu-gyeong was removed to a general ward, preparing to go home. Her mother, who had been sleeping on a cot next to her bed woke at the sound of the beep. Wu-gyeong's face was blue. "Doctor!" The doctor, sensing an emergency, covered the baby's small stomach with his hand. Wu-gyeong's ribs broke at the violent CPR. The oxygen saturation level, which had been crashing toward zero, returned to seventy. "What's wrong with Wu-gyeong?" On the baby's chart, the doctor wrote, "lung disease, cause unknown." Wu-gyeong returned to the ICU. Four months later, the hospital said that she had no chance. Wu-gyeong went from Busan all the way to Seoul on an ambulance while an intern and her mother took turns pumping a manual resuscitator.

Wu-gyeong stayed a year more in the hospital in Seoul. She received two heart surgeries after the doctors discovered a hole in her heart. "Heart disease, cause unknown," was added to her medical chart. She was discharged from the hospital, because there was nothing more that they could do to help her. The day she was discharged, the nurse gave Wu-gyeong's mother a manual ventilator and taught her CPR. Wu-gyeong's face often turned blue. She went to the hospital in Seoul in an ambulance in the middle of the night ten more times after that. Back home, Wu-gyeong's mother could not sleep well at night. Still, she did not forget to wash the humidifier and add the humidifier sterilizer.

When Wu-gyeong was about two years old, she was able to breathe without a respirator. The family had a grand birthday party, which they couldn't have on Wu-gyeong's first birthday, when she turned two. A relative’s child, the same age as Wu-gyeong, ran around the room, while Wu-gyeong's father sat her on his lap for she could not even sit on her own. "Wu-gyeong, look here!" "Wu-gyeong!" No matter how they called her, she just stared into the air. Her mother thought that she might be developing at a slower pace than the average child. Wu-gyeong began exercise therapy. Whenever her mother carried Wu-gyeong on her back and climbed up and down the five stories to the therapy room, she was exhausted. She found it hard to change the water in the humidifier, so she no longer used it. Along the way, the humidifier sterilizer could no longer be found in their home.

One day in 2011, the couple watched the news. People were crying on TV. They said that they had used the humidifier sterilizer manufactured by Oxy. "What would have happened if we used the Oxy product? It's a relief that we used the one from Aekyung." Wu-gyeong's mother calmed her beating heart. But after watching that news, whenever she lay down to sleep, she kept seeing the image of the hospital room with the white vapor coming out of the humidifier. She began to think maybe this was all because of the humidifier sterilizer. She scanned hundreds of pictures she had taken since Wu-gyeong was a baby. A picture with a bottle of Humidifier Mate behind Wu-gyeong's face caught her eyes.

Wu-gyeong turned twelve this year, but her arms and legs are extremely thin. The muscles below her knees did not grow properly so she must sit in a wheelchair for she cannot walk on her own. When her mother called her, she struggled to crawl over from the other side of the room. "How did you enjoy your trip to Seoul yesterday?" Instead of answering, Wu-gyeong looked elsewhere. She sometimes remembered what had happened the day before, but sometimes she did not. In a disability test she took before entering elementary school, she was designated as having a class-1 developmental disability, intellectual disability and a brain injury.

Wu-gyeong was exposed to humidifier disinfectants for over three years since birth. She inhaled as much of the moisture from the humidifier as she did oxygen. She has developmental disorders, asthma, and rhinitis. From 2004 until 2016, she visited the hospital 852 times for various diseases with unknown causes. Her mother thinks Wu-gyeong, who was expected to leave the hospital healthy, is suffering from developmental disorders because of the humidifier disinfectants. It might not be the case, but there are also plenty of possibilities and grounds for such thoughts. Wu-gyeong's mother asks, "Our baby did not use Oxy humidifier disinfectants and she is not suffering from lung disease, but developmental disorders. So whom should I speak to?"

The environmental ministry excluded CMIT and MIT contained in Aekyung's Humidifier Mate, which Wu-gyeong's mother used, from the cause of damage suffered by those who used humidifier sterilizers. Wu-gyeong’s mother submitted an application for the fourth registration of humidifier disinfectant victims, but the government limited the victims to those who seek to be recognized as victims of lung diseases caused by the chemical substances used in humidifier sterilizers. The prosecutors are currently investigating the humidifier disinfectant case, but SK Chemicals, which manufactured Humidifier Mate, and Aekyung, which sold the product, were excluded from the investigation. Wu-gyeong is sick, but no one knows why she is sick, and no one wants to know.