Part II: Speed
Explainer: What are e-cigarettes? New battery-powered devices deliver nicotine, a dangerous and addictive drug By Amanda Leigh Mascarelli | March 19, 2014
[Warm up] Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, are battery-powered electronic devices. They were developed as an alternative to tobacco products, such as cigarettes. Indeed, because e-cigarettes lack tobacco — and emit no smoke — the companies that make them have argued their products are safer than cigarettes. Indeed, they were developed as a way to help smokers wean themselves off of tobacco. But while potentially safer than inhaling tobacco smoke, vapors from e-cigarettes are far from harmless, health officials note.
E-cigarettes release nicotine, an addictive and potentially dangerous drug. So users can become dependent on e-cigarettes much as smokers become addicted to tobacco.
A tiny light at the tip turns on when someone takes a puff. This is meant to resemble the burn of a regular cigarette. So to the eye, e-cigarettes may resemble traditional cigarettes or cigars. But instead of burning tobacco, a small battery inside powers a device that heats a liquid solution to create an aerosol spray. It emerges like an invisible mist. This is what the user will inhale.
E-cigarette companies call this aerosol a vapor. As a result, many people refer to puffing on e-cigarettes as vaping. The solution used to create that vapor contains various ingredients. These include flavors that sometimes resemble fruits, candy, mint or chocolate.
As of 2012, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 1.78 million school kids had at least tried e-cigarettes. Currently, there are no U.S. regulations on the advertising and sale of e-cigarettes. [243 words]
Source: Student Science https://student.societyforscience.org/article/explainer-what-are-e-cigarettes
Poisonings linked to e-cigarettes Electronic cigarettes are increasingly a source of reports of harm made to poison-control centers, and young kids are often the victims By Janet Raloff | April 8, 2014
[Time 2] E-cigarettes look much like traditional cigarettes, but don’t burn tobacco. Instead, they heat up a mix of chemicals to create a vapor that is breathed in. The practice is called vaping. That’s because users inhale gas vapors — not smoke — from these devices. Already millions of teens have tried vaping. And what they inhale can include nicotine, an addictive substance, as well as chemicals that cause cancer. Now, a report links poisonings to these tobacco alternatives. And the victims can be as young as kids in preschool.
E-cigarettes were developed as a way to help smokers stop using tobacco. In the United States, they have been available since 2007. But more and more people have been choosing to use these devices for another reason — for fun. And this includes teens. About one in every 10 U.S. high school students has used electronic cigarettes. Among middle school students, the number who have tried the devices is already one-third that high — and climbing.
Finding e-cigarettes is easy. Even local convenience stores sell them. And because the devices are not yet regulated by the government, in most cases, even pre-teens can legally buy and use them.
In fact, the e-cigarette industry has been targeting the sale of its products to teens, recent studies have found.
But e-cigarettes are not completely safe. What’s more, even people who are not using the devices may be harmed by them, according to the new study.
Kevin Chatham-Stephens works at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, in Atlanta. He and his co-workers surveyed logs of phone calls to U.S. poison control centers between September 2010 and February 2014. They looked for records of any calls that mentioned exposure to e-cigarettes or to the liquids that are burned in them to create those vapors. The scientists turned up 2,405 calls.
Almost 60 percent of e-cigarette calls reported harm from the products. Vomiting, nausea and eye irritation were the most common symptoms that physicians or other people talked about in the calls to poison control centers. Almost one in six calls about harm linked it to inhaling e-cigarette vapors. A similar number of calls described problems due to eye or skin exposures. [364 words]
[Time 3] But more than half of the callers reported problems that occurred after eating or drinking the solutions — a mix of chemicals — that are bought to flavor e-cigarette vapors. That isn’t all that surprising because many of the vapor flavorings have been designed to appeal to our taste buds. This also may explain why half of the reports to poison control centers involved victims no more than 5 years old. Youngsters could have been drawn to the solutions’ smells or to the yummy foods pictured on their labels.
Many vapor flavorings appear to have been chosen especially for their appeal to children. That was the conclusion of researchers working in a Stanford University School of Medicine program that has focused on tobacco advertising. Among the flavors that they found were being sold for vaping in e-cigarettes: mint chocolate chip, vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce, fried ice cream, sherbet, bubble-gum, licorice, caramel, gummy bear, apple pancakes, cookies and cream, chocolate chip cookies, pineapple, mango-peach, banana, strawberry mint, root-beer float, iced lemonade, Dr. Pepper, pizza and bacon.
Right now, no one knows which chemicals might be responsible for making people who are exposed to e-cigarettes or their flavorings sick.
The CDC team found that calls to poison control centers about e-cigarettes have been rising sharply. Only one call was reported in September 2010. By February 2014, the rate had jumped to about 215 calls per month. Chatham-Stephens’ team reports its findings in the April 4 Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report.
As half of the reported toxic exposures involves young children, the CDC researchers argue that finding a better way “to monitor and prevent future poisonings is critical.”
Clearly, poisonings linked to e-cigarettes are “an emerging public health concern,” they write. That’s a message, the team says, that must reach the public, doctors, e-cigarette makers and the people who make and advertise flavored solutions for e-cigarettes. [313 words]
Source: Student Science https://student.societyforscience.org/article/poisonings-linked-e-cigarettes
Health risks of e-cigarettes emerge Vaping pollutes lungs with toxic chemicals and may even make antibiotic-resistant bacteria harder to kill By Janet Raloff | June 3, 2014
[Time 4] Electronic cigarettes, marketed as safer than regular cigarettes, deliver a cocktail of toxic chemicals including carcinogens into the lungs, new studies show. Using e-cigarettes may even make bacterial infections resistant to antibiotics, according to one study.
Engineers developed e-cigarettes several years ago to provide tobacco users a smoke-free source of nicotine. The devices heat up a liquid that a user inhales, or “vapes.” Because e-cigarettes burn nothing, they release no smoke.
“There’s no question that a puff on an e-cigarette is less toxic than a puff on a regular cigarette,” says Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco. But few studies have looked at the toxicity of their vapors. As a result, scientists have been circumspect about describing e-cigarettes as safe.
For a May 13 review in Circulation, Glantz and his team pored over emerging data on what vapers are inhaling and found, he says, greater risk than scientists had thought. E-cigarettes deliver high levels of nanoparticles, the researchers found, which can trigger inflammation and have been linked to asthma, stroke, heart disease, and diabetes (SN: 7/18/09, p. 26). The levels “really raise concerns about heart disease and other chronic conditions where inflammation is involved,” he says.
E-cigarettes are no longer niche products, he and others note. Vaping product sales last year were projected to hit an estimated $1.7 billion, report Ii-Lun Chen and Corinne Husten of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products in Rockville, Md., in a special May issue of Tobacco Control on e-cigarettes. E-cigarette sales may exceed those of traditional cigarettes within 10 years, the pair reports. At least 1 in 5 smokers has tried e-cigarettes, as have 10 percent of U.S. high school students, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More than 250 different brands of electronic cigarettes are available on the market (a few examples shown), and many dozens of solutions are used to generate the devices’ vapors. [332 words]
[Time5] Those people may think vaping is safe, but FDA has seen no data establishing anything like that, writes the agency’s Priscilla Callahan-Lyon in the same journal. She reviewed data from 18 studies on e-cigarettes’ vapors and found that most contain at least traces of the solvents in which nicotine and flavorings had been dissolved. Those solvents, she reports, are known as lung irritants.
And the solvents can transform into something even more worrisome: carbonyls. This group includes known cancer-causing chemicals, such as formaldehyde, and suspected carcinogens, such as acetaldehyde. Because early e-cigarettes didn’t deliver the same powerful hit of nicotine that burning tobacco does, engineers developed second-generation technology that allows users to increase an e-cigarette’s voltage, and thus temperature, to atomize more nicotine per puff.
But the higher temperatures also can trigger a thermal breakdown of the solvents, producing the carbonyls, explains Maciej Goniewicz of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y. If users of second-generation e-cigarettes maximize the power on their devices while using vaping liquids containing a solvent mix of glycerin and propylene glycol, formaldehyde levels can reach that found in tobacco smoke, his team reports May 15 in Nicotine & Tobacco Research.
Such compounds in smoke are mainly a concern if they make it all the way into the lungs. Many biologists think particle size and count are key, says Glantz. Vapers can inhale huge numbers of very small aerosols — the most toxic size — that can then deposit into the lung’s tiniest airways, which are pivotal to moving air into the body.
The median diameter of vaping particles falls around 200 to 300 nanometers, based on unpublished data from Jonathan Thornburg and others at RTI International in Research Triangle Park, N.C. That size “is right in line with conventional tobacco smoke,” Thornburg says. [297 words]
[Time 6] The mass of particles in the vapors is about 3 milligrams per cubic meter of air, he says, or about 100 times as high as the Environmental Protection Agency’s 24-hour exposure limit for levels of fine air particles. Thornburg’s group’s analyses predict that some 40 percent of these inhaled particles would deposit in the lungs’ smallest, deepest airways.
In addition to nicotine and solvents, vapors also contain chemical flavorings and food preservatives from the vaping liquid. Although they may be GRAS, or “generally recognized as safe” by FDA, Thornburg says, the designation is based on tests of the compounds when they are ingested. “No one has considered their safety when it comes to inhalation,” he says.
And e-cigarette vapors can even make dangerous germs harder to kill, Laura Crotty Alexander reported May 18 at an American Thoracic Society meeting in San Diego. A pulmonary and critical care physician and scientist with the VA San Diego Healthcare System, she exposed methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, better known as MRSA, to e-cigarette vapors.
In a lab dish, these antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which can cause pneumonia, proved harder to kill using a germ-killing protein fragment — a natural antibiotic that people’s bodies make. One reason: Germs exposed to nicotine-rich vapors secreted a thicker biofilm coating that protected them.
Crotty Alexander also allowed mice to breathe in air containing MRSA that had been exposed to e-cigarette vapors. One day later, mice getting vapor-exposed germs had three times as many bacteria growing in their lungs as did mice that got unexposed germs.
“We started these studies so that we could advise our smoking patients on whether they should try switching to e-cigarettes,” she says. “My data now indicate they might be the lesser of the two evils. But e-cigarettes are definitely not benign.” [294 words]
Source: ScienceNews https://www.sciencenews.org/article/health-risks-e-cigarettes-emerg |