I think there may have been more, but your general point stands that these were isolated incidents.
Unfortunately we'll never hear the end of it.
C.f. the Indy Star hit job article that I just posted about yesterday in this area (in which the author said that PVDs
"contain" diethelyne glycol.
No. There are NOT more. Furthermore, the hazards of "diethylene glycol" (DEG) are a non-issue.
The FDA's "testing" in 2009 was geared toward trying to find something hazardous. When they couldn't, they decided to spin the results to make things
sound hazardous.
One of the 18 cartridges tested was found to contain 1% DEG. You can verify this yourself by reading the report:
http://www.fda.gov/downloads/drugs/scienceresearch/ucm173250.pdf
Note that the paragraphs that are labeled "Simulated Use" refer to what was found in the vapor, while "Whole Cartridge" refers to what was detected in the liquid. Note that the one sample that contained DEG was tested as a
liquid. (Each sample could only be tested as either a liquid
or a vapor, because the testing destroys the sample).
The FDA failed to find anything at all hazardous in the vapor. DEG can be hazardous if you drink it. But you have to drink a lot of it within a 24 hour period because it clears from the body quite rapidly. Rats need to receive 50 mg per kg of body weight to exceed the "no observed adverse event level" (NOAEL). When dealing with a 1% solution, a one-ml cartridge would contain 10 mg of DEG. You'd have to drink 5 one-ml cartridges full of liquid for each kg you weigh. How likely are you to quaff over 400 cartridges worth of e-liquid in a single day?
However, for obvious reasons, people don't make a habit of drinking e-liquid. To my knowledge, DEG has not been found to be poisonous via inhalation.
The FDA's press release is a masterpiece of propaganda. DEG is mainly used as a solvent, but the FDA spin-doctors called it "an ingredient used in anti-freeze" because they knew there had been many poisonings of pets and children before the makers of standard automobile antifreeze switched from using ethylene glycol to propylene glycol, which is non-toxic. The FDA spinners also used loaded words like "carcinogens" and "toxins" and ignored the rule that "the dose makes the poison." What that means is that in small enough amounts, a potentially toxic substance is harmless. In large enough amounts, a normally perfectly safe substance can be deadly--even water.
You may be unaware of this, but the "carcinogens" they found were Tobacco-specific Nitrosamines (TSNAs). Because the pharmaceutical-grade nicotine used in e-liquid is extracted from tobacco, there may be tiny traces of TSNAs in it. In fact, you might be very surprised to learn that TSNAs are found in several of the FDA-approved nicotine products such as the patch and nicotine gum. What's even more surprising is that the amount in a nicotine patch is about equal to the amount in 18 mg/ml e-liquid. See this report:
http://www.healthnz.co.nz/RuyanCartridgeReport30-Oct-08.pdf
See "Comment 1)" under Table 2.2 on page 7.
So if the patch isn't known to cause cancer, it seems unlikely that e-cigarettes would so so. In point of fact, modern Western smokeless tobacco products, which have not been found to increase the risks of any type of cancer, contains much higher amounts of TSNAs.
To get back to DEG, the fact that it was found in an entirely non-harmful amount in one sample, one time, has been inflated by anti-nicotine/anti-tobacco writers who turn "one" into "several" without a trace of shame.
But even if there were some DEG in every batch of e-liquid, that would still be a non-issue, since it doesn't occur in the vapor.
This is exactly what ocurred with analogs.
