From Euro Parliament TV.
The good news is that there is “no ban in sight”, however I would still be concerned how they plan to regulate ecigs. At moment it still looks like electronic cigarettes will be “lumped in” with either pharma or tobacco, neither of which are a good fit. Electronic cigarettes need their own unique classification and regulation.
An open message to European MEPs
by Dave Dorn from Vapour Trails TV
Could e-cigarettes save smokers lives?
Could e-cigarettes save smokers’ lives? Some health advocates think so
by Carly Weeks from The Globe and Mail (Canada)
Are electronic cigarettes dangerous and potentially hazardous to health or an important tool that can help people quit smoking?
It depends on whom you ask.
Many Canadian health organizations once viewed e-cigarettes, which are battery-powered and turn a liquid solution into a vapour, as a threat. But as more evidence emerges of their potential role in helping people wean themselves off cigarettes, those attitudes are rapidly shifting.
Michael Siegel, a physician and professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, says e-cigarettes “could literally save thousands of lives.”
Despite this, the federal government doesn’t allow e-cigarettes containing nicotine to be sold in Canada. A large number of public-health experts and tobacco-control advocates are pressing for a change. While there are many unknowns about the long-term safety of e-cigarettes and whether they help people quit smoking, it appears they are a safer alternative to traditional cigarettes.
“I think we owe it to the five million Canadians who are addicted to tobacco products. If there’s a product out there that may have some merit to bring down those numbers, we have to look at it,” said Jennifer Miller, vice-president of health promotion with the Lung Association.
The Lung Association used to warn that e-cigarette users were inhaling toxic chemicals. But new evidence convinced the organization to change its position and it says they may be a valuable smoking cessation aid.
Former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona, who brought the world’s attention to the dangers of secondhand smoke and pushed for indoor smoking bans, joined the board of a major e-cigarette company last month. Carmona said that it is essential to have a high-quality alternative to traditional cigarettes.
Worldwide Electronic Cigarette Survey
Message from Dr Farsalinos
Thank you for your willingness to participate to the survey we have prepared. This study has been designed in order to better understand and present the views of the electronic cigarette community and to present the benefits observed as a result of using the electronic cigarette. All vapers are invited to participate, whether they have stopped or they continue smoking tobacco cigarettes.
http://www.ecigarette-research.com/web/index.php/component/content/article?id=80
American Council on Science and Health SLAM Guardian article
from American Council on Science and Health
In a recent op-ed in the UK’s Guardian, a Tom Riddington — ostensibly a physician — condemns in no uncertain terms the increasing uptake of electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) by hundreds of thousands of desperate, addicted UK smokers (soon to be millions in all likelihood). A similar trend in the e-cigarette market has been documented in both Europe and here in the U.S.
Despite the fact of such enormous use, and the fact that e-cigarettes contents consist, in their entirety, of water vapor, nicotine in various concentrations, flavorings and evaporants including vegetable glycerin or propylene glycol (recognized as safe by regulatory agencies for decades), the writer confabulates scare stories and resorts to citing the thoroughly discredited FDA analysis of 2009 to warn smokers away from the devices. He points out, accurately (the only accurate assertion in this remarkably off-target essay) that there have not yet been any long-term studies of e-cigarette safety. As is often the case, people like him advise smokers to stick to the known “safe” methods of helping smokers quit.
As is always the case, the warning never address the fact that the tried-and-true, tested and approved cessation aids fail to help smokers quit much, much more often than they work. In fact, an article in a respected journal by authors known to be generally supportive of the FDA dogma exposed the fallacy of the ineffective drugs: which concluded thusly: “This study finds that persons who have quit smoking relapsed at equivalent rates, whether or not they used NRT to help them in their quit attempts.” Translation: smokers trying to quit did just as well with, or without, the approved nicotine replacement products.
ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross added this perspective: “It would be sad indeed if British smokers — or Americans for that matter — took this writer’s alarmist tripe as authoritative and avoided or stopped using e-cigarettes to help them quit. We do know the long-term effects of cigarette smoke, and the picture is not pretty: fully one-half of long-term smokers die as a result of their habit. Any method to help get them off their deadly addiction should be welcomed, not trashed based on nonsense and hyper-precaution.”
Up in a puff of smoke? EU plan threatens e-cigarettes
from The Independent
Anti-smoking campaigners have reacted with dismay at the prospect of electronic cigarettes, the devices that help smokers avoid the lethal effects of tobacco, being banned under a proposed change to European Union law.
A review of the EU Tobacco Products Directive currently under way includes a proposed new regulation which would require any device containing more than 4mgs of nicotine to be authorised as a medicinal product.
E-cigarettes look and feel like real cigarettes and are designed to mimic the experience of smoking without the harmful consequences. They heat nicotine to deliver an inhaled mist which reproduces some of the effects of smoking minus the cancer-causing chemicals produced by burning tobacco.
To gain authorisation under the new regime, e-cigarettes would have to undergo expensive clinical trials – rendering them commercially non-viable and effectively banning them.
Amanda Sandford, a spokesperson for Ash, the anti-smoking charity, said: “For the EU to treat e-cigarettes as tobacco products muddies the waters and causes confusion. It would be far better to treat them on a par with nicotine replacement products which are available over the counter through pharmacies and newsagents.”
No smoke. Why the fire?
The world should welcome the electronic cigarette
SOME inventions are so simple, you have to wonder why no one has come up with them before. One such is the electronic cigarette. Smoking tobacco is the most dangerous voluntary activity in the world. More than 5m people die every year of the consequences. That is one death in ten. People smoke because they value the pleasure they get from nicotine in tobacco over the long-term certainty that their health will be damaged. So it seems rational to welcome a device that separates the dangerous part of smoking (the tar, carbon monoxide and smoke released by the process of combustion) from the nicotine. And that is what an e-cigarette does. It uses electricity from a small battery to vaporise a nicotine-containing solution, so that the user can breathe it in.
E-cigarettes do not just save the lives of smokers: they bring other benefits too. Unlike cigarettes, they do not damage the health of bystanders. They do not even smell that bad, so there is no public nuisance, let alone hazard, and thus no reason to ban their use in public places. Pubs and restaurants should welcome them with open arms.
Read full article at http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21573986-world-should-welcome-electronic-cigarette-no-smoke-why-fire
Representation to EU Commission re: Tobacco Products Directive concerning Electronic Cigarettes
Audio from meeting held in Brussels two days ago by the Tobacco Commission where they listened to electronic cigarettes associations, doctors and some company opinions. Well worth listening to we think. Starts at about 7 minutes in. Click link below to listen.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/
‘A better way: Saving millions of lives with e-cigarettes’
Visit http://www.ecita.org.uk/blog/?p=464 to read this excellent publication for the reasons why the European Parliament should NOT classify electronic cigarettes as a medicinal product.
Study: E-Cig Vapor ‘Less Injurious’ Than Cigarette Smoke
Independent research continues to support electronic cigarettes as safe alternative
from CSP Net
BUFFALO, N.Y.– A newly released independent study of the chemical constituents of electronic cigarette vapor shows that e-cigarettes drastically reduce a user’s exposure to various chemicals found in tobacco cigarettes. Titled “Levels of Selected Carcinogens and Toxicants in Vapour From Electronic Cigarettes” and published by Tobacco Control, the study concluded that e-cigarettes could be a promising harm-reduction tool.
“The results of this study support the proposition that the vapor from e-cigarettes is less injurious than the smoke from cigarettes,” wrote the report’s lead author, Maciej L. Goniewicz of the Buffalo, N.Y.-based Roswell Park Cancer Institute. ‘Thus one would expect that if a person switched from conventional cigarettes to e-cigarettes the exposure to toxic chemicals and related adverse health effects would be reduced.”
Goniewicz and his fellow scientists analyzed levels of selected carbonyl compounds, volatile organic compounds, tobacco-specific nitrosamines and metals found in the vapor of 12 different e-cigarette brands, comparing the results to the levels found in both tobacco cigarettes and in a medicinal nicotine inhaler.
The report found that “levels of selected toxic compounds found in the smoke from a conventional cigarette were 9-450-fold higher than levels in the vapor of an e-cigarette. … Exposure to acrolein, an oxidant and respiratory irritant thought to be a major contributor to cardiovascular disease from smoking, is 15 times lower on average in e-cigarette vapor compared with cigarette smoke. The amounts of toxic metals and aldehydes in e-cigarettes are trace amounts and are comparable with amounts contained in an examined therapeutic product.”
There was still some risk associated with compounds found in e-cigarette vapor, particularly an exposure to carcinogenic formaldehyde. The study found similar amounts of formaldehyde in tobacco cigarettes, e-cigarettes and medicinal inhalers–although the amount of formaldehyde found in the 12 different brands of e-cigarettes ranged from 3.2 micrograms per 150 puffs (comparable to the levels from the nicotine inhaler) to 56.1 micrograms per 150 puffs.
In his “Tobacco Analyses” blog, Michael Siegel theorized that the formaldehyde could be the result of the heating of propylene glycol or the oxidation or hydrolysis of glycerin and advocated further research.
Even with the formaldehyde findings, the study–which was not funded by e-cigarette companies, but by the Ministry of Science & Higher Education of Poland and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)–provides strong evidence in support of e-cigarettes.
“Our findings are consistent with the idea that substituting tobacco cigarettes with e-cigarettes may substantially reduce exposure to selected tobacco-specific toxicants,” the report said. “E-cigarettes as a harm-reduction strategy among smokers unwilling to quit, warrants further study.”