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- Category: September 2019
Electronic cigarette makers were counting on Asia as a growth market. But the region may not be a refuge from an escalating crackdown in the U.S.
India banned electronic cigarettes last week, days after Juul Labs Inc.’s products vanished from online Chinese marketplaces. [...] But some nations still view e-cigarettes as viable alternatives to smoking, a leading cause of preventable death. Public health officials in Britain, the biggest market in Europe for the products, endorse vaping as a way to wean people off smoking. [...]
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- Category: September 2019
[...] What ties together the patients who died in Tulare County and Los Angeles County is not that they both vaped "electronic cigarettes," but that they both used illicit THC (marijuana) vaping cartridges that they purchased illegally off the black market. In the two other deaths in which authorities released information about the products used (one in Oregon, one in Minnesota), each involved vaping marijuana, not electronic cigarettes.
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- Category: September 2019
A top U.S. health official told lawmakers Tuesday that e-cigarette market leader Juul uses salts in its vaping devices that she said could be particularly dangerous for teenagers.
“Juul products use nicotine salts, which can lead to much more available nicotine,” CDC Principal Deputy Director Dr. Anne Schuchat told the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s panel on consumer products. She said doctors believe the salts allow nicotine to “cross the blood brain barrier and lead to potentially more effect on the developing brain in adolescents.”
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- Category: September 2019
A leading heart consultant called for a ban on vaping and warned: “It’s more dangerous than smoking and booze combined.” President of the International Society For Vascular Surgery, Prof Sherif Sultan, described e-cigarettes as “the disaster of the century”. Prof Sultan, who is based in the Galway Clinic, is now calling on the Health Minister to ban the use of e-cigs immediately. He said: “Simon Harris needs to step in now before it’s too late and ban them. He needs to follow in Donald Trump’s footsteps. [...]
Vapour from e-cigarettes can kill cells that protect lungs and damage immune system, study concludes
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- Category: September 2019
Vapour from e-cigarettes can kill off cells which line human airways, new research has suggested.
A study by scientists at the University of Adelaide in Australia found fumes from three types of apple-flavoured vaping liquid could destroy bronchial epithelial cells. The researchers also discovered the vapour could interfere with the immune system, in particular by disrupting macrophages: white blood cells which digest and store unhealthy cells and foreign debris.
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- Category: September 2019
Smoking kills. That such a damaging and irrational behaviour persists in many countries where the health risks of smoking are well understood and most smokers want to quit, is testimony to the power of nicotine addiction. Quitting is difficult, particularly without medication and behavioural support, but persuading smokers to accept help can also be difficult: most choose to quit unaided, and usually fail. Regular smokers therefore tend to remain smokers for decades, and in due course half are killed by their smoking. [...]
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- Category: September 2019
I have argued that a flavored e-cigarette ban would drive masses of ex-smokers from vaping back to smoking. This prediction now seems to be confirmed by a number of tobacco financial analysts, who are alerting investors that such a ban would substantially boost the sale of cigarettes while decimating the e-cigarette market, which has nearly doubled in the past year. It is predicted that nearly all of the declines in vaping will be translated into cigarette smoking.
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- Category: September 2019
Walmart has said it will no longer sell e-cigarettes in the US, amid mounting calls to ban the products entirely. The retailer said its decision was due to "uncertainty" about the rules governing e-cigarettes, which US health authorities have linked to more than 500 cases of lung injury. On Friday a group of US senators called on health authorities to remove all pod and cartridge-based e-cigarettes from the market until it can be proven the products are safe.
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- Category: September 2019
At a time when the rapid growth in electronic cigarette "vaping" among young people threatens to reverse decades of progress in reducing tobacco use, a large study [...] finds that medical professionals are largely failing to use existing tools to help young people quit smoking.
Medicaid data from more than 80,000 adolescents and young adults diagnosed with nicotine use disorder indicated that only four percent had received counseling to encourage them to stop using tobacco products, only 1.2 percent were prescribed medications to help them quit, [...]
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- Category: September 2019
How can a government justify criminalizing people for using safer methods to use a legal recreational substance? This question is the centerpiece of all prohibitions against vaping as the global outrage about the behavior grows exponentially.
India, a country of millions of smokers, just banned e-cigarettes nationwide.
“The decision was made keeping in mind the impact that e-cigarettes have on the youth of today,” India’s finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, said in a press conference. [...]
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- Category: September 2019
Vaping-related illnesses are killing the buzz for entrepreneurs who have been riding high on the marijuana legalization boom.
Sales of vaping products — the fastest-growing segment of the burgeoning pot market — are falling nationwide amid reports of hundreds of mysterious lung ailments — the vast majority of which have been linked to vaping THC, the main psychoactive compound in marijuana that gives the high sensation.
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- Category: September 2019
Researchers are working hard to determine the cause of more than 500 reported cases of lung illness affecting e-cigarette users. But even before this outbreak, e-cigarettes divided the medical community. Public Health England describes e-cigarettes as "at least 95% less harmful than tobacco cigarettes" – a claim New York University professor David Abrams agrees with. Abrams tells "CBS This Morning" Tony Dokoupil why he's concerned about what the current panic about e-cigarette safety could mean for public health.
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- Category: September 2019
Juul Labs Inc. pursued a strategy to win over Washington. But the e-cigarette maker wound up further alienating regulators, helping to thrust the once-soaring startup into a crisis that threatens its business. Facing scrutiny stemming from surging teen use of its vaporizers, Juul has tried over the past year to position itself as a responsible actor in an industry with few rules. It overhauled its marketing, halted retail-store sales of its fruity flavors that young people favor and introduced a checkout system to curb illegal sales to minors.
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- Category: September 2019
A study into the impact of flavoured e-cigarettes, on allergic airways disease, suggests that some flavours may worsen the severity of diseases such as asthma. For the first time a model of asthma was used to investigate the effect of a range of popular e-cigarette flavours, with and without nicotine.Dr. David Chapman, UTS researcher and lead author of the study published in Scientific Reports, said this was the first study to investigate the effects of flavoured e-cigarettes with and without nicotine on allergic airways disease.
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- Category: September 2019
The Ministry of Health and Welfare has recommended smokers who use e-cigarettes to refrain from using their devices until it completes investigation into the relationship between the liquid-type e-cigarettes and lung diseases. "After coordinating with the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS), we will conduct a full-scale investigation for the ingredient analysis of liquid-type e-cigarettes," a health and welfare ministry official said.
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- Category: September 2019
Many experts regard the delivery of nicotine through vaping to be less risky than smoking traditional cigarettes, because it avoids most of the harmful combustion products inhaled through cigarette smoke.
Whether vaping works to help people quit smoking continues to be debated, although some clinical trials show it is more effective than other quit aids such as nicotine patches. We know some people who vape in Australia are doing so because they used the practice to quit smoking cigarettes.
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- Category: September 2019
To date, over 20 countries, mostly in South America, the Middle East and South-East Asia, have banned the sale of e-cigarette products. Some countries have also banned possession of these products. Thailand has the strictest laws, while countries such as Australia, Canada and Norway have introduced many restrictions.
Research suggests that e-cigarettes may help smokers quit regular cigarettes benefiting their long-term health. But young people who have never smoked traditional cigarettes are taking up e-cigarettes, which are available in over 1,500 flavours, [...]
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- Category: September 2019
[...] Rudroneel Ghosh spoke with Riccardo Polosa, professor at department of clinical and experimental medicine, University of Catania, Italy, on approaches to mitigating harm caused by tobacco:
How severe is the problem of tobacco harm in India?
The problem is enormous. There are two parts to it. One is the tobacco that Indians smoke which is about 100 million people, and the second is chewing tobacco which entails another 300 million. As you know tobacco can kill, particularly tobacco that you smoke which can cause cardio-vascular disease, [...]
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- Category: September 2019
Indian officials have long recognized that public health is better served by focusing on attainable solutions rather than far-flung ideals. Yet when it comes to smoking, their faith in this principle is waning. Rather than developing a regulatory framework to ensure that e-cigarettes are available alongside their more dangerous cousins — combustible cigarettes — public health officials have simply chosen to ban them.
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- Category: September 2019
New York has officially banned most flavored e-cigarettes since vaping-related deaths started to come to light. [...] But the original function of e-cigarettes was to act as a nicotine replacement for those suffering from addiction.
“I've always used these e-cigarettes [for patients] to get them off cigarettes,” Dr. Marc Siegel said Wednesday on FOX Business’ “Varney & Co.” “A study out of the New England Journal of Medicine this year shows that it works better than any other nicotine replacement product -- better than the gum, better than the patch. [...]