Experts respond to "Vaping as bad as fags"
National redtop tabloid leads with a story about vaping affecting the heart.
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by Dave Cross
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The Sun wrote about how “Whitehall insiders” had told the paper that the TPD will “be scrapped” and that the “draconian ban” on minty flavours would not come to pass. Eurosceptic bingo players were shouting with joy as they checked off “meddling rules”, “hated EU judges” and “nanny state”.
The paper quoted Institute of Economic Affairs’ Chris Snowden saying: “Brexit offers a great opportunity to get rid of unnecessary and meddlesome EU regulations. Bans on menthol cigarettes, packs of ten and various types e-cigarette fluid never had any serious justification. Even David Cameron said he couldn’t understand why the EU wants smokers to buy more cigarettes. A great repeal bill should be drawn up and crazy laws like this should be on it.”
But any support for vaping was short-lived as they declared “vaping bad” this week. “Tests found e-cigarettes damage key blood vessels,” their journalist in Rome claimed, although his partner contradicted this position in her piece for The Telegraph.
The broadsheet pointed out: “the study was not designed to show whether electronic cigarettes can cause long term damage to our blood vessels.” The test measured how stiff the aorta got (the vessel carrying oxygen-rich blood from the lungs) after vaping. They quoted lead researcher Charalambos Vlachopoulos saying: “If the aorta is stiff you multiply your risk of dying, either from heart diseases or from other causes.”
In 2014, Konstantinos Farsalinos conducted a study looking at vaping and its effects on the aorta. The research team’s conclusion was: “that e-cigarette use has no adverse effect on the walls of the aorta or its function.”
Earlier this year, scientists at the Medical Research Council Integrative Epidemiology Unit discovered significant differences in the manner in which heart cells respond to vape when compared to the effects of cigarette smoke.
So, how can this latest study be so contradictory? It’s quite obvious, according to Clive Bates: “The claim that prompted these headlines was made at a conference, the European Society of Cardiology congress in Rome, by Professor Charalambos Vlachopoulos, of the University of Athens Medical School. It is, of course, sponsored by pharma interests.”
As Bates and Michael Siegel point out, the same observations of aorta stiffness can be found when someone is drinking coffee, playing sport, stretching their neck or listening to rock music, and none of those activities have (so far) been linked directly to cardio-vascular disease.
While vapers will have paid little heed to the exaggerated nonsense in the newspapers, it is a shame that smokers and their loved ones might factor it into a decision not to quit using ecigs; the cause of harm reduction has not been served by this sorry saga.
Dave Cross
Journalist at POTVDave is a freelance writer; with articles on music, motorbikes, football, pop-science, vaping and tobacco harm reduction in Sounds, Melody Maker, UBG, AWoL, Bike, When Saturday Comes, Vape News Magazine, and syndicated across the Johnston Press group. He was published in an anthology of “Greatest Football Writing”, but still believes this was a mistake. Dave contributes sketches to comedy shows and used to co-host a radio sketch show. He’s worked with numerous start-ups to develop content for their websites.
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