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 Big U.S. tobacco companies are all developing e-cigarettes,
battery-powered gadgets with a heating element that turns liquid
nicotine and flavorings into a cloud of vapor that users inhale.
Some previous research suggests vapor from e-cigarettes may be less
toxic than traditional cigarette smoke, but the electronic
alternatives still release chemicals that aren’t normally in the air
and the long-term health effects of the ingredients and flavorings
in e-cigarettes are unclear.
Overall, just 5.3 percent of adults who participated in a 2015
online survey thought exposure to secondhand e-cigarette vapor
caused “no harm” to kids, the study from the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention found. Another 40 percent of adults
thought it caused “little harm” or “some harm” to children.
“The bottom line is that kids should not be exposed to the emissions
from any type of tobacco product, irrespective of whether that
product is smoked, smokeless or electronic,” said senior study
author Brian King, a researcher with the CDC Office on Smoking and
Health in Atlanta.
“Although e-cigarette aerosol generally contains less harmful
ingredients than secondhand smoke, it is not harmless; safer is not
the same thing as safe,” King said by email. “It’s important for
users of these products, particularly parents, to know the dangers
of secondhand exposure to e-cigarette aerosol and to protect kids
from this preventable health risk.”
To assess how adults thought about the risk of exposing kids to
e-cigarettes, CDC researchers examined data from a survey of 4,127
adults 18 or older. The survey asked people to consider the
potential harms of all electronic vapor products including
e-cigarettes as well as e-hookahs, hookah pens, vape pens and
e-cigars.
Current e-cigarette users were almost 18 times more likely than
people who never tried the devices to think the secondhand vapors
caused no harm to children, and former e-cigarette users were more
than seven times more likely to have this opinion, according to the
results published in the CDC journal Preventing Chronic Disease.
Compared with people who never smoked traditional cigarettes,
current smokers were more than four times more likely to consider
secondhand e-cigarette vapor harmless for kids, and former smokers
were about twice as likely to have this opinion, the study found.
Men were more than twice as likely as women to think secondhand
e-cigarette fumes were harmless for kids.
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Adults aged 45 to 64 were less likely to be uncertain about the risk
of exposing kids to second-hand e-cigarette smoke than younger
adults aged 18 to 24, the study also found.
One limitation of the study is that researchers didn’t have detailed
data to determine how often current or former e-cigarette users and
cigarette smokers had used these products, the authors note. That
means responses from heavy users were included in the same
categories as people who only smoked or vaped occasionally.
Still, the findings underscore the need to raise awareness about the
potential harms as researchers continue to investigate the long-term
health effects of e-cigarettes, said Dr. Alexander Prokhorov,
director of the tobacco outreach education program at MD Anderson
Cancer Center in Houston.
“The products simply have not been in existence long enough to
investigate their long-term effects,” Prokhorov, who wasn’t involved
in the study, said by email.
“It took us decades to fully understand the devastating consequences
of conventional cigarettes and we are regularly discovering more and
more illnesses and disorders attributable to active and passive
smoking,” Prokhorov said. “I would not be surprised if ongoing
studies will soon report additional facts on first- and second-hand
vaping and health.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2r4cn1g Preventing Chronic Disease, online May
31, 2017.
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