I have a very different take on this study that I don't think has been addressed yet. I think BAT was throwing down a political gauntlet to the scientific community, somewhere along the lines of "I dare you to reproduce this and publish"
Many people here find the results incredulous, or nearly so. But really, it's sort of a Duh moment if you have a handle on the components of vape juice and their histories...
PG has long been used in the medical industry as a "base" for various inhalers, and I think they even fog rooms with it? Now, it stands to reason that before the medical industry started using that as an (FDA approved) inhalation vehicle, that much study was done on possible toxicity. No one may have done quite the same study BAT did using the particular tissue cultures but one way or the other PG must have been determined to be quite safe.
VG has long been used as "Disco smoke" and we can certainly expect that OSHA and whoever looked closely at the possible toxicity issues related to inhalation and I am confident that VG is known, as an absolute fact, to the best of the ability of real science, to be quite benign when inhaled.
BAT, and BT in general, has been doing 100 years of research into Nicotine. So surely they know it is benign. We know it, but we also know of the "conspiracy" to equate Nicotine with smoking, and etc, etc, ad nauseum. But at the end of the day, inhaled nicotine is quite safe and everyone knows it even though the PTB refuse to quite acknowledge that.
So that leaves just whatever flavorings BAT used (or might have used). And despite the few protestations to the contrary here, no one is ever going to unravel the mysteries of all the hundreds of flavorings we use now. But surely BAT, in the normal course of their research into the eCig market, has at least informally studied the flavor issue, to the extent they felt they would test well. The only people surprised are the people here that are convinced (via propaganda) that their "must be something unsafe with these eCigs".
So aside from flavoring issues, really the results of this study are not any more interesting or surprising than a study indicating well filtered spring water is safe to drink.
But the politics that the
vaping industry is faced with, and that includes BT to the extent they want to be players, demands that gauntlet be thrown. Otherwise no one would study it because they won't like the answer that everyone knows will come out of any study such as this.
vaping really is safe.