http://www.themonitordaily.com/vaping-not-tobacco-alternative/212620/
Although vaping is regarded as a safer alternative compared to tobacco, recent research suggests that e-cigarettes may be as dangerous as traditional cigarettes.
The primary reason is that both of them contain nicotine, the only difference consisting in the fact that these electronic devices vaporize the flavored nicotine liquid. This hotly debated topic will be discussed Wednesday on October 19 at the School of Public Health, where many experts will gather.
According to a Linda Bauld, the deputy director of the United Kingdom Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies, e-cigarettes cannot be regarded as a safe alternative because they come with certain risks.
Therefore, they can only be seen as a possible short-term solution to ‘a uniquely deadly product that kills one in two of its regular users.’ She further adds that there is no current evidence that e-cigarettes can be a life-safer for young adults.
The director for regulatory science and policy at the Schroeder Institute for Tobacco Research and Policy Studies at Truth Initiative, Andrea Villanti, supports Bauld by saying that solid proof is needed in order to label these vaping devices as excellent quit-smoking tools.
Also, everyone knows that e-cigarettes are most likely harmful to a certain extent, but maybe not as harmful as tobacco. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently decided to focus not just on reducing tobacco use but also to prevent e-cigarettes from becoming widely popular across the country.
Needless to say that these new regulations are quite controversial because they require companies to specify exactly what their vaping devices contain by 2018 in order to receive marketing permission.
According to a professor of socio-medical sciences at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Ronald Bayer, e-cigarette use and tobacco are more than controversial topics as they are also quite political.
Based on the statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), around 12.6 percent of American adults tried e-cigarettes in 2014, while 3.2 percent of them never smoked before.
CDC reports further reveal that last year, 16 percent of teenagers admitted they had used vaping devices in the past month before the study, showing a 1.5 increase compared to 2011. About 17,000 teenagers start smoking every year in California, and around 35 percent of them will most likely die because of nicotine and tobacco-related diseases