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 Britain's Royal College of Physicians (RCP) said on Thursday.
In a report likely to further fuel a debate over electronic
cigarettes, the influential British doctors group stressed that
tobacco smoking is both addictive and lethal, and concluded that
e-cigarettes are "much safer than smoking".
E-cigarettes are not a gateway to smoking, the RCP said, and do not
lead to the normalization of the habit - two issues often cited by
critics who fear the devices can lure children and young people into
smoking habits.
"None of these products has to date attracted significant use among
adult never-smokers, or demonstrated evidence of significant gateway
progression into smoking among young people," the RCP's 200-page
report said.
E-cigarettes, which heat nicotine-laced liquid into vapor, have
rapidly grown into a global market for "vaping" products that was
estimated at around $7 billion in 2015.
Tobacco smoking kills half of all smokers, plus at least another
600,000 people a year non-smokers via second-hand smoke. This makes
it the world's biggest preventable killer, with a predicted death
toll of a billion by the end of the century, according to the World
Health Organization (WHO).
Many public health experts think e-cigarettes, or vapes, which do
not contain tobacco, are a lower-risk alternative to smoking, but
some questions remain about their long-term safety.
Linda Bauld, a professor at Stirling University, deputy director of
the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies and a co-author of the
RCP report, said that unlike tobacco, nicotine does not cause
cancer, heart and lung diseases.
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"The ideal is for people to use nothing," she said, but when the
alternative is smoking, people should be encouraged to use nicotine
"delivered in a cleaner form than in deadly cigarettes".
"This is what tobacco harm reduction is - it reduces the harm from
tobacco while recognizing that some people will still use nicotine
in other safer forms."
John Britton, chair of the RCP Tobacco Advisory Group which
published the report, acknowledged that e-cigarettes were "a topic
of great controversy" but said his group's analysis "lays to rest
almost all of the concerns over these products".
The anti-smoking group ASH UK welcomed the report, saying it showed
"that switching to vaping is a positive and sensible life choice"
for smokers.
"Electronic cigarette vapor does not contain smoke, which is why
vaping is much less harmful," said Deborah Arnott, ASH's chief
executive.
(Editing by Dominic Evans)
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