E-cigarettes ‘draw new smokers’
EXPERTS gathering at the 17th World Conference on Tobacco or Health have warned that although electronic smoking devices are being marketed as safe alternatives to conventional cigarettes, they are the tobacco industry’s way of finding a new generation of smokers.
The introduction of e-cigarettes in 2004 was seen as a way to help smokers quit, but their popularity among young people is creating “new nicotine addicts”, said Shannon Gravely, a researcher at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Gravely says the trend of “vaping” has increased exponentially over the years, even though it comes with substantial health risks. This has led governments to start adopting policies to regulate their sales and marketing.
“Currently the research on the use of vapour products is concentrated in North America and Europe. There has been very little work in low and middle-income countries. So few studies have compared e-cigarette use across countries,” said Gravely.
She added that there had been a notable increase in e-cigarette use in countries in low to middle-income countries such as Bangladesh and Zambia, that have little awareness of electronic nicotine products and no regulation against their use.
In Italy, researchers found that the number of non-smokers who wanted to try the new Philip Morris product, IQOS, a tobacco-based “heat-not-burn” product, outnumbered current smokers.
Dr Silvano Gallus, from the Department of Environmental Sciences in Milan, says IQOS – which got its name from “I Quit Ordinary Smoking” – had achieved the opposite.
“When they were first launched they were meant to encourage people to stop smoking.
“In the end they got more people hooked, including attracting non-smokers to becoming addicted,” said Gallus.
Late last month, a study of almost 70 000 people led by the University of California (UCSF) found daily use of electronic cigarettes nearly doubles a person’s risk of a heart attack.
“The new study shows that the risks compound. Someone who continues to smoke daily while using e-cigarettes daily has an increased risk of a heart attack by a factor of five,” according to Dr Stanton Glantz, the director of the UCSF’S Center for Tobacco Research, Control and Education, who co-authored the study. – Health-e News