Negative Spit Study
North Carolina researchers look at lung mucus.
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by Dave Cross
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The team state an absolute lie in their introduction, in that there is an “assumption by many that e-cigarette use is harmless and a safe alternative to cigarette smoking”. Due to the misinformation campaign raging in the States and Australia this is the exact opposite of what it happening.
Likewise, they use bogus and corrupt studies to support a claim that there is a “formation of toxic aldehydes in e-cigarette vapours,” and that electronic cigarettes “produce levels that exceed occupational safety standards”. By this stage it becomes clear that this is just another study purporting to be scientific research – but it is far from adhering to the scientific process.
Induced sputum samples from 14 current cigarette smokers, 15 current e-cigarette users and 15 never smokers were collected, but the team do not indicate how long it has been since the vapers quit – or even if they still smoked too. They were considered to be vapers even if they smoked up to five cigarettes per week.
They did highlight that “the majority of the subjects in the studied e-cigarette user group (12 of 15) had smoked cigarettes at some time in their tobacco product use history before becoming predominant e-cigarette users”, but that is the limit to the detail. In fact, this basic omission is so glaringly obvious that it could lead most sentient observers to conclude that misdirection was their intention all along.
Cigarette smokers were recruited from an exceptionally heavy use subset. The group involved in this study averaged 35 cigarettes per day.
The team concluded: “Our study clearly demonstrates a unique e-cigarette-induced innate lung response that includes markers of an aberrant neutrophilic response. Taken together, our results indicate that the effects of e-cigarettes are both overlapping with and distinct from what is observed in otherwise healthy cigarette smokers.” It is possible that there is substance to their conclusion, but the errors and poor quality of referencing cast strong doubts over the paper.
Mehmet Kesimer, the lead author, said: “There is confusion about whether e-cigarettes are 'safer' than cigarettes because the potential adverse effects of e-cigarettes are only beginning to be studied. This study looked at possible biomarkers of harm in the lungs. And our results suggest that in some ways using e-cigarettes could be just as bad as smoking cigarettes.”
It is worth bearing in mind that Public Health England has declared electronic cigarettes to be “at least 95% safer than smoking” – a conclusion agreed with by the Royal College of Physicians and the Cochrane Review.
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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