Judging by the news, the spectacle surrounding e-cigarettes isn’t going to calm down any time soon. If it’s not a politician claiming – without ever providing any evidence, if I may add – that somehow a smoking-cessation aid is going to encourage not only smoking dangerous tobacco-burning cigarettes but smoking them in public, then it’s uninformed rhetoric from any news source or “concerned” party proclaiming the unknown dangers of e-liquids. No one has done tests, they’ll proclaim, how can we know it’s safe for the vaper and those around them? Facts seem to be few and far between when it comes to the discussion of the safety of electronic cigarette vapor.
The problem is, of course, there have been studies, and a number of them at that. Even the FDA has done a study.
Unfortunately, these don’t seem to be enough to dissuade the naysayers from their campaign against e-liquids. The biggest concern to come up is undoubtedly nicotine; there’s plenty of confusion regarding what the unsafe part of a cigarette actually is, and that gets piled on top of the fact that studies utilizing therapeutic nicotine for Alzheimer’s and other diseases get zero attention. For the sake of discussion, we’ll leave aside the fact that e-cigarettes and vaping overall don’t actually have to contain much, if any, nicotine once a vaper has successfully quit smoking. The vegetable glycerin and flavorings rarely garner public attention for safety issues, likely due to the fact that these are solidly FDA-approved and used in just about everything the modern American consumes.
That means that the other most purportedly dangerous ingredient in e-liquids is propylene glycol. Anti-vaping sources will call it an antifreeze, but neglect to clarify that propylene glycol is not hazardous like ethelyne glycol. They’ll harp yet again on “unknown health risks.” Absurdly, rather than funding new studies, this turns into an argument for banning e-cigarettes entirely.
It goes unmentioned and unrecognized that both the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization have recognized propylene glycol as safe for human consumption. In fact, it’s used to simulate smoke when training firefighters, and during stage productions. The only health risk noted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Registration is possible skin irritation if there’s frequent contact with pure propylene glycol. Propylene glycol breaks down relatively quickly, both in the body and in the environment (including air), without any of the resulting harmful substances from ethelyne glycol.
The Environmental Protection Agency itself issued a Registration Eligibility Decision on propylene glycol in 2006, which cites FDA approval “for use in hospitals as air disinfectants” as early as 1950. Yes, you read that date correctly. Propylene glycol has been approved to be inhaled by the sick, injured, immune compromised and otherwise unhealthy patients and healthy hospital staff at all levels for the past 64 years. That would require studies to have been conducted for some years before that. Are we really meant to believe that vaping in the office or at a bar is going to harm perfectly healthy bystanders?
It’s at this point in the conversation when most e-cigarette opponents will slap you with their “think of the children” argument. Flavors that are in any way tasty, promoted and used by celebrities of any age or demographic, and the fact that cig-a-like vapes glow at one end are all reasons opponents claim e-cigarettes are aimed at kids. Surely there’s been no studies of how an antifreeze would affect breathing and lung health in children. Right?
Wrong again. Are you ready for the real kicker?
A paper in the American Journal of Public Health cites a study that states:
The report of the 3 years’ study of the clinical application of the disinfection of air by glycol vapors in a children’s convalescent home showed a marked reduction in the number of acute respiratory infections occurring in the wards treated with both propylene and triethylene glycols. Whereas in the control wards, 132 infections occurred during the course of three winters, there were only 13 such instances in the glycol wards during the same period.
The date of that article? 1946. The date of the cited study? 1944. That means that, scientifically speaking, in a peer reviewed health setting, propylene glycol has been recognized as not only safe for children to inhale, but definitively healthier than normal air so long as there is a visible fog of vapor for the past 70 years.
So why is it, in the 21st Century, health organizations have suddenly forgotten their own data? It’s not that more studies shouldn’t be done to determine the health effects of electronic cigarette vapor. It’s that the research that is in place is being ignored in favor of political rallying. If the powers that are to take over regulating electronic cigarettes refrain from using preexisting scientific findings in order to meet the needs and interests of politicians and the lobbyists that influence them, vapor and everyone who has benefited from it will certainly suffer.