Scientists blast UK’s ‘vaping is low-risk’ advice

EXPERTS have warned that the Government’s insistence that vaping is 95 per cent safer than smoking cigarettes is not backed by evidence and risks encouraging a harmful addiction.

The statistic has been parroted by NHS experts for the past five years in the hope that tobacco-smokers will switch to e-cigarettes.

But the statement is a groundless ‘factoid’ which should be dropped, say scientists writing in the American Journal Of Public Health.

They say the misleading statistic could lead people to underestimate the true dangers of e-cigarettes and become hooked, seriously harming their health in years to come.

‘Senior public health staff emphasised the “evidence” underlying the 95 per cent figure, despite the evidence being lacking,’ wrote Dr Thomas Eissenberg at the Center for the Study of Tobacco Products at Virginia Commonwealth University, with US colleagues. The percentage was first cited in a 2013 academic paper, in which 12 scientists tried to rank the relative harms of a dozen nicotine-containing products.

Even the authors admitted there was ‘a lack of hard evidence for the harms of most products’ they were assessing. A ‘growing body of research’ since 2013 has found ecigarettes do indeed cause harm.

This includes cell and lung damage and physiological signs that vapers put themselves at greater risk of heart disease, such as increased heart rate and blood pressure. In addition, ‘numerous studies’ in the US have found e-cigarettes act as a gateway to smoking tobacco, say the medics. And e-cigarettes have become more powerful, exposing users to higher levels of nicotine and other toxic substances.

The authors conclude: ‘Evidence of potential harm has accumulated. Therefore, the evidence-lacking estimate derived in 2013 cannot be valid today. The “95 per cent safer” estimate is a “factoid”: unreliable information repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.’

Last night, John Newton, an NHS public health director, said: ‘Medical bodies across the world agree that e-cigarettes are not without risk but are far less harmful than smoking.

‘The 95 per cent estimate was developed by independent academics that we agreed was a reasonable estimate at the time and a helpful way of communicating the different scale of risk between smoking and vaping... [we are] constantly reviewing the evidence around e-cigarettes and we shall publish our next review in the next couple of months.’

‘95 per cent safer claim is an unreliable factoid’