June 6, 2016 – E-cigs and Stopping Smoking

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Anchor lead: Do e-cigarettes help people stop smoking? Elizabeth Tracey reports

The British Royal College of Physicians has recently come out in favor of the use of e-cigarettes to assist smoking cessation efforts, to the confusion and consternation of many.  Enid Neptune, a lung expert and anti-smoking advocate at Johns Hopkins, comments.

Neptune: Many of the people in the tobacco control community here in the United States are a little puzzled by that position of the British Health Society, mainly because there’s such a lack of data.  It’s not because the data is negative, or the data is supportive of the use of e-cigarettes for smoking cessation, is that we have very little data that suggests it’s either helpful or harmful, and we don’t expect to get that data without doing longitudinal studies.  :31

Neptune says no one knows what the long term effects of vaping are right now, but evidence is clear that liquid nicotine preparations are very harmful to toddlers, and that adolescents seem to be taking up the habit at alarming rates. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.