Health experts defend e-cigarettes despite concerns

ABU DHABI: Health experts at an anti-tobacco conference in Abu Dhabi defended e-cigarettes on Friday, dismissing widespread concerns that the devices could lure adolescents into nicotine addiction.

Most experts agreed, however, that use of the devices, about which research warns that not enough is yet known, should be regulated.

Konstantinos Farsalinos, researcher from Onassis Cardiac Surgery Centre in Athens, told AFP that in a study of nearly 19,500 people, mainly in the United States and Europe, 81 per cent said they had stopped smoking by using e-cigarettes.

“In fact, they quit smoking very easily within the first month of the e-cigarette use on average,” he said.

“That’s something you don’t see with any other method of smoking cessation.”

But on Wednesday, World Health Organisation(WHO) chiefMargaret Chan backed governments that are “banning... regulating” e-cigarette use.

She was speaking to reporters at the World Conference on Tobacco or Health, hosted by the capital of the United Arab Emirates which has so far banned the devices.

“Non-smoking is the norm and e-cigarettes will derail that normality thinking, because it will attract especially young people to take up smoking,” said Chan. “So I do not support that.” But for Jean-Francois Etter, associate professor at Geneva University, “e-cigarettes and nicotine and tobacco vapourisers should not be excessively regulated”.

This could “decrease the numbers of smokers who switch to these new products”, benefiting “only the big tobacco industry” whose leaders “will be able to survive in a tightly regulated environment”.

Etter called the WHO stance on e-cigarettes “political”.

“I think that the WHO people should know better than kill alternatives to smoking cigarettes,” he said.

E-cigarettes were first produced in China in 2003, and have since spread globally.

They have sparked what several participants at the gathering called a “very divisive debate”.

Alan Blum, a family doctor and director of The University of Alabama Centre for the Study of Tobacco and Society, says he would usually recommend ecigarettes to patients trying to quit, rather than “give a pharmaceutical product which has side effects and which have not worked very well”. — AFP