PHE: US Lung Illness Reports Wrongly Made Britons Think Vaping Is Worse Than Smoking

According to news on March 5 and a report by The New York Times, public health experts in London said on Wednesday that more than half of UK smokers now wrongly believe that nicotine-containing e-cigarettes are just as dangerous as tobacco cigarettes, and these misplaced fears are preventing smokers from switching to vaping products.

In a report commissioned by Public Health England (PHE), scientists at King’s College London said that after reports of thousands of lung injury cases in the United States at the end of 2019, people mistakenly came to believe that e-cigarettes were more harmful than smoking.

They said this view is completely inconsistent with expert commentary in both the UK and the US, which concluded that using regulated nicotine vaping products is far less harmful than smoking.

The report is PHE’s sixth report on e-cigarettes and may deepen divisions over the products’ potential risks.

Last month, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had recorded more than 2,800 cases of vaping-related lung injury.

John Newton, Director of Health Improvement at PHE, said it is worrying how much the outbreak of lung disease in the United States has affected smokers’ views of e-cigarettes in the UK.

He said concerns about safety are likely preventing many smokers from switching to e-cigarettes, putting them on a path toward years of poor health and early death caused by smoking.

U.S. health authorities have said that vitamin E acetate, a thickening agent added to cannabis vaping products, may be the main cause of the outbreak in the United States.

That substance is banned in regulated nicotine e-cigarettes in the UK.

PHE’s report reiterates the agency’s view that e-cigarettes are far less harmful than tobacco, though not completely safe.

In the report summary, PHE said that the harmful chemicals they contain are greatly reduced compared with smoking-related disease risks, but the long-term effects of using e-cigarettes will remain unknown for some time.

It added that any move by the UK to ban the use of flavors in regulated e-cigarette products, as has been done in the US and other countries, would prevent smokers from switching to e-cigarettes and would ultimately cost lives.

The U.S. government has proposed a comprehensive ban on all e-cigarette flavors, as these products are seen as attracting young users.