Are Electronic Cigarette's Safe?
Nothing is 100% safe – neither the regular cigarettes, nor the electronic ones. Every daily activity in which we engage has a level of risk, both for our health and for our lives. However, the thing which we should consider is not absolute safety, but what is safer, and what is less safe.
A study ran by Joel Nitzkin (chair of the Tobacco Control Task Force for the American Association of Public health Physicians) has shown that the risk posed by the electronic cigarette is only 0.1% to 0.01% of the one posed by the tobacco cigars. This means that the number of lung cancer casualties could be reduced by 1000 to 10 000 times, if this innovative product would be accepted as a form of smoking addiction treatment.
David Sweanor, former advisor to the World Health Organization, has repeatedly declared that there is no such thing as "safe" and all regulation institutions should start thinking in terms of "safer". As he said, it's risky to allow your kids to play soccer, however you'd rather have them do that then playing with grenades. Comparing the electronic cigarette to the tobacco one is like comparing a 4 wheel family car to a sport scooter. Neither is safe, but the first one is much safer.
Unlike the regular cigar, the electronic one contains no tar. The tar is known to be one of the main contributors to the occurrence of lung cancer. Also, no toxins were detected in the vapor inhaled from the e-cigarette. When testing the levels of carcinogens, the scientists have found that they are equivalent to the ones found in peanut butter and most nicotine cessation aids.
Even more, the key feature of the electronic cigarette is that there is no combustion involved, thus no smoke. The core idea was to replace the harmful pellet burning with simple heating. The solution through which the warm air passes contains only Propylene Glycol and nicotine. Both have great safety profiles and the Propylene Glycol is actually used in foods which we ingest on a daily basis. Also, a 3 years study carried out on children in a hospital has shown that its inhalation reduces the risk of contacting the flu and various other infections. During another famous study, Propylene Glycol was directly injected in humans without any kind of secondary effects.
Finally, the FDA has publicly admitted that the electronic cigarette induces less nicotine intake in the blood than the tobacco cigar. There is no 100% guarantee and no long term studies were carried out, but all experiments ran up to this point suggest that switching to the e-cigarette is much safer than sticking to the tobacco.
