Blog Home

It has been reported that the FDA was recently flooded by an "unprecedented" 255,000 fake comments urging it to ban flavored e-liquids.

This month, THR Rendez-vous interviewed tobacco control advocate David Sweanor on a number of topics, including tobacco harm reduction and this year's Global Forum on Nicotine. THR Rendez-vous, an online blog, has hosted "cyberinterviews with 180 tobacco control advocates from all over the world" since 1999.

Dr Konstantinos Farsalinos has produced another study in conjunction with colleague at the Onassis Cardiac Surgery Centre. This one compares the emissions from an IQOS heated tobacco product with the vape from an ecigarette and smoke from tobacco. While vaping is much safer than both, he has words of caution for subohmers.

 

Experts at the 5th Global Forum on Nicotine, held in Warsaw last week, agree on the urgent need to embrace a harm reduction model for e-cigarettes. To deprive smokers of a less harmful alternative would be "unethical", said Dr. Farsalinos.

Dr. Farsalinos reviews the first "evidence" of e-cigarette use linked to chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD) and laryngeal cancer.

An international team of researchers examined gut bacteria from smokers, vapers and non-smokers. The findings indicate that the gut bacteria of vapers and non-smokers is the same, while smokers have significant differences in their microbiome.

The latest wave of anti-vaping articles feature a recent study from John Hopkins School of Public Health. The study claims to have found unsafe levels of metals in e-liquids. Dr. Konstantinos Farsalinos, research fellow at Onassis Cardiac Surgery Center and an early researcher into the effects of vaping, comments on this most recent assault on vaping and helps put the study's results into context.

"Some positive news from the US, as the American Cancer Society (ACS) released a statement indicating a change in attitude towards electronic cigarettes. The organization finally recognizes the research in favour of e-cigarette use for smoking cessation, and recommends that physicians support smokers who choose the devices as their preferred cessation aids."

Three years after their groundbreaking review, Public Health England (PHE) has released another independent expert evidence review on the effects of vaping. Their key take-away re-affirms their initial findings from 2015: "vaping is only a small fraction of the risks of smoking and switching completely from smoking to vaping conveys substantial health benefits".

Research from Italy that looked at the oral condition of real-world vapers who had just switched from smoking, indicated that the shift to the safer alternatives greatly improved their oral health.

Smokeless tobacco and vapor products are far less dangerous than cigarettes are, but the public-health elite won’t admit it.