Dripping – The New Devil?
American media loses the plot over baseless dripper scare story.
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by Dave Cross
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“Your child could be ‘dripping’ - and it's extremely dangerous. It's a new trend for teens who vape. ‘Dripping’ is supposed to produce more smoke and flavour from an e-cigarette. Doctors say it also releases high levels of cancer-causing chemicals,” goes the hysterical voice on an absolute joke of a news story, watchable below.
Doctor Sujatha Ramamurthy has her finger on the pulse. It may be the pulse of the wrong patient, who is an expired goat, but she is going to have her say: “It can cause cancer or breathing problems and could increase the chance of respiratory infections and things like that. Maybe see more agitation, anxiety, and hyperactivity in teens.” It’s surprising she left out that vaping causes teeth to fall out, extended periods of rain and the distinct possibility of another Sex And The City film.
The driver of this panic? Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin, professor of psychiatry at Yale. She led a study claiming to have found “that one in four high-school students who use electronic cigarettes are inhaling vapours produced by dripping e-liquids directly onto heating coils, instead of inhaling from the e-cigarette mouthpiece, possibly increasing exposure to toxins and nicotine.”
Possibly. “Possibly increasing exposure to harmful chemicals like formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, and acrolein in the vapours.”
Possibly.
Krishnan-Sarin isn’t done yet: “One of the concerns I have is when you are looking at the safety and risk of e-cigarettes, one really has to look at the risks of alternative uses also. What we are discovering with our work with youth is that kids are actually using these electronic products for other behaviours, not just for vaping e-liquids from cartridges or tanks.”
Was this a thorough investigation? Well, not if the Yale press release is anything to go by: “The researchers did not assess whether the students added nicotine to the e-liquids used for dripping, or how frequently e-cigarettes were used for dripping.”
It’s yet another piece of junk science that fails to investigate the issue in any depth, fills its pages with ‘maybes’, ‘coulds’ and ‘possiblys’, and ends up being nothing more than a vehicle for baseless outrage and groundless moral panic.
Hidden from the sight of the American public, American Vaping Association ‘s Greg Conley commented: “It is also important to keep the science in perspective: The study authors refer to ‘studies on emissions performed with machines’, but ignore evidence that actual human vapers recognize aldehyde production very early in its formation and find it so intolerable that they will quickly take action to ensure that it does not continue.”
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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