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New cancer study says e-cigarettes are still bad for you

Thursday, April 10, 2014 20:31

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(Before It's News)

We’ve all seen it before: an individual who obviously thinks they’re super cool is hanging out in a bar, concert, or just casually sitting eating dinner. A puff of vapor shoots out of their mouth as onlookers briefly gawk at the spectacle, only to realize that this individual isn’t smoking a real cigarette and is instead puffing away on an e-cig.

Since Canada and most U.S. states, although New York has some e-cig bans in place, don’t have laws about smoking (or rather vaping) e-cigarettes in public places, doing so seems to be a strange but mostly accepted activity.

But the next time your friend who’s trying to quit smoking says e-cigarettes aren’t harmful to their health, remind them about this recently released study. While the science is complicated, according to these new findings, people exposed to e-cig vapor suffer from similar negative effects to individuals who are smoking or are around normal cigarette smoke.

This file photo taken on March 5, 2013, shows a person smoking an electronic cigarette in Paris.

Scientists exposed human bronchial cells to e-cigarette vapor and found that it altered the cells in almost the same way tobacco does. The saving grace for vapor smoking enthusiasts is it’s still unclear if this cell alteration actually causes cancer. According to Nature, in the study e-cigarettes, “showed a similar pattern of gene expression, ” but the changes are not identical to the effects of smoking regular cigarettes.

“They may be safer [than tobacco], but our preliminary studies suggest that they may not be benign,” said study author Avrum Spira, a genomics and lung cancer researcher at Boston University.

A recent study also indicated the liquid nicotine inside e-cigs is poisonous and deadly if consumed directly, to the shock of hopefully no one. Apparently an e-cigarette also exploded in a U.K. bar recently, setting a server on fire.

In the U.S., the country’s Food and Drug Administration still isn’t regulating e-cigs even though the product has quickly evolved into a billion-dollar industry. Health Canada has banned the sale of e-cigarettes containing nicotine and it’s also illegal to make any kind of health benefit claims about the product, although this certainly hasn’t stopped convenience stores across the country from selling e-cigarettes containing nicotine.

E-cigarettes are also available on the internet through various legitimate and shady retailers, so even if they end up being more heavily regulated in terms of sale, people will still easily be able to get their hands on them.

The moral of the story here is, while smoking e-cigarettes is harmful, it still hurts you less than smoking actual cigarettes. Also, many people claim e-cigs a great cigarette cessation tool, although some studies refute this.