Vaping risk suggestion ‘absurd’

A US public health expert has described as absurd a suggestion that smoking cannot be said to be any more hazardous than is vaping.

Dr. Michael Siegel, a professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health, reported on his blog that an expert at Penn Medicine, the University of Pennsylvania’s health care system, was telling the public that smoking cigarettes, such as Marlboros, Camels, and Newports, might be no more hazardous to their health than was vaping a tobacco-free e-liquid.

“We know that cigarettes are unsafe after 40 years of exposure,” the expert was quoted as saying. “We don’t have 40 years of exposure to e-cigarettes to know what the danger is. We don’t know the safety profile, so we can’t say that e-cigarettes are safer than traditional cigarettes.”

Siegel said that if the expert was saying that it couldn’t be said that electronic cigarettes were safer than were traditional cigarettes, then the expert was saying was that it couldn’t be said that smoking was any more hazardous than vaping.

‘This is an absurd statement, completely in conflict with scientific evidence, and not even the tobacco companies would make such a claim,’ Siegel wrote…

‘In other words, the statement of this expert is essentially a huge advertisement for tobacco cigarettes, the most deadly consumer product on the market in terms of its toll on the lives and health of Americans.’

Siegel’s blog, The Rest of the Story, is at: http://tobaccoanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/penn-medicine-expert-smoking-may-be-no.html