The report, conducted by independent authors professor Ann McNeill, from King’s College London, and professor Peter Hajek, from Queen Mary University of London, promotes the use of e-cigarettes as a safer alternative to tobacco cigarettes. The researchers say that very few adults and young people who have never smoked are becoming regular users of e-cigarettes – less than 1% in each group.
Advertisement
The study concluded that most of the harmful chemicals in tobacco are not found in e-cigarettes. A Welsh Government spokesperson yold the BBC: “We are concerned the use of e-cigarettes may renormalise smoking, especially for a generation who have grown up in a largely smoke-free society”.
City of York Council’s executive member for adult social care and health Councillor Carol Runciman said: “City of York Council welcomes Public Health England’s report, “E-cigarettes: an evidence update”, which provides a useful evidence base to inform our local planning for services to support smokers across the city who wish to quit”. More importantly, over 16 million Americans are now living with a smoking-related disease.
“There has been a major trend recently towards the use of e-cigarettes, and they are now the number one quitting aid used by smokers”.
“Free Stop Smoking Services remain the most effective way for people to quit but we recognise the potential benefits for e-cigarettes in helping large numbers of people move away from tobacco”. Monitoring their child’s tobacco use used to be as simple as smelling their clothes for smoke, but new tobacco and nicotine products are making it more hard.
“Show non-permissive attitudes about smoking anything, including e-cigarettes, so that kids pick up that it’s not okay to start any nicotine product, including e-cigarettes”, said Rome. “If everybody who was smoking switched to e-cigarettes that would reduce to about 4,000 deaths a year”.
The publicly-funded study goes against a 2014 report by the World Health Organization that called for stiff regulation of e-cigarettes and bans on their indoor use and sale to minors.
The latest such study suggests the former, as it claims e-cigarettes are 95 percent less harmful than conventional tobacco products, and that the United Kingdom’s National Health Society could prescribe them to patients trying to quit smoking.
Advertisement
The comments mark the first time a major health body has endorsed e-cigarettes and attempted to debunk the “myth” that vaping is bad for the health.
