Anti-Vaping Advocates Support Indoor Vaping Bans Because We Don ' t Know if Secondhand Vaping is Harmful

In an interesting twist from the usual reasoning in public health, anti-vaping advocates are promoting the enactment of policies that ban vaping in public places not because secondhand vaping has been shown to have serious health hazards, but because it hasn ' t been proven to be benign.In anopinion piece published inTobacco Control, Dr. Simon Chapman and colleagues support a ban on vaping in public places because we don ' t know yet whether secondhand vaping is harmful. The authors write that: " those advocating for vaping to be allowed in smoke-free public places centre their case on gossamer-thin evidence that vaping emissions are all but benign and therefore pose negligible risks to others akin to inhaling steam from showers, kettles or saunas. This is likely to be baseless. Unlike vapourised water, electronic nicotine delivery system (ENDS) emissions comprise nicotine, carbonyls, metals, organic volatile compounds, besides particulate matter, and putative carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon. ... Importantly, the short time span since the advent of ENDS and the latency of candidate respiratory and cardiovascular diseases that may be caused or exacerbated by ambient exposure to ENDS emissions preclude definitive risk inference. Taking the current immature evidence as a proof of safety and using it to advocate for policy that allows ENDS indoors could prove reckless. "The only known evidence of the hazards of secondhand vaping that the article is able to cite ...

Source: The Rest of the Story: Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary - March 21, 2017 Category: Addiction Source Type: blogs