Health officials are responding to a Portland State study that found formaldehyde was a byproduct of vaping.
BY JACOB PALMER | OB DIGITAL NEWS EDITOR
Health officials are responding to a Portland State study that found formaldehyde was a byproduct of vaping.
OregonLive.com reported on concerns some Multnomah County officials are having about the growing prevalence of e-cigarettes:
On Tuesday, community members voiced support for placing age restrictions on the product. E-cigarettes, which are unregulated, vaporize liquid nicotine and deliver it to the lungs.
The Fairview City Council will vote on age restrictions next week. In Washington County, Hillsboro, Banks and North Plains have approved some restrictions on e-cigarettes as have some universities, school districts and Benton County, according to a Multnomah County report about e-cigarettes.
Go Local PDX examined how popular vaping has been with teens who can currently walk into a store and buy the product without restriction. Contributor Joanna Evoniuk interviewed Multnomah County deputy health officer Dr. Jennifer Vines for the story:
A 2015 study at the National Jewish Health in Denver revealed smoking the vapor from e-cigarettes can increase the risk of respiratory viral infections. Vine said vaping still introduces young adults and teens to nicotine, which can lead to physical and mental health problems in the future, and promotes a culture of smoking.
“Adolescences a key time in how kids develop and what they think is normal,” Vine said.
But is the uproar over the perceived dangers of overblown? Syndicated columnist Joe Nocera argued that the way the media is consuming the Portland State study — reported by OregonLive.com — is misleading and causing unwanted consequences.
In an op-ed column first printed in the New York Times, Nocera bemoaned that a misguided perception is causing some to return to combustible cigarettes.
It is, on the one hand, factually true that vaping at an extremely high voltage will cause formaldehyde-releasing agents to develop. But this conclusion is highly misleading. People don’t vape at a high voltage because it causes a horrible taste — “a burning taste that occurs from overheating the liquid,” wrote Konstantinos Farsalinos, a Greek scientist and vaping expert, in an email to me. Farsalinos has done human studies of vaping and discovered that above a certain voltage — lower than the high voltage test on the Portland State study — people simply couldn’t inhale; the taste was unbearable.
Indeed, the study actually conveys good news. When used at normal voltage, vaping does not produce formaldehyde! “Rather than scaring people about the dangers of vaping and alarming them to the ‘fact’ that vaping raises their cancer risk above that of smoking, we should instead be regulating the voltage and temperature conditions of electronic cigarettes so that the problem of formaldehyde contamination is completely avoided,” wrote Michael Siegel, a professor of public health at Boston University, on his blog. But given the way the Portland State authors characterized their research, it’s no surprise that headline writers took away a different message.
