The next time your station airs a story on electronic cigarettes, could you please stop disseminating the disinformation published by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
First of all, the FDA did not do a random sampling. There are hundreds of companies marketing electronic cigarettes. The FDA chose to test the products of two companies, Smoking Everywhere and Sottera Dba
njoy. It is not a coincidence that these are companies that had filed suit against the FDA in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The lower court has issued an injunction against the FDA seizing incoming products at U.S. Customs. The court’s opinion document pointed out that the FDA failed to present any evidence that anyone has been harmed by the products. The injunction was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals. Yet the FDA continues to waste taxpayer money filing appeal after appeal in an effort to prove that electronic cigarettes are dangerous, unapproved drug delivery devices.
When the FDA’s tests did not reveal any chemicals that present a danger to human health, the Public Relations department was enlisted to spin the results into something that sounded frightening. The words “carcinogens” and “antifreeze” were carefully selected for their shock value. Who does not fear developing cancer or being poisoned?
The information that the FDA withheld was that
tobacco-specific Nitrosamines (TSNAs), the chemicals referred to as “carcinogens” in the FDA ‘s press conference, are also found in FDA-approved nicotine products such as the patch, gum, lozenges, and inhalers. The FDA also failed to mention that the largest of quantity of TSNAs they found in an e-cigarette cartridge is approximately the same quantity as contained in a 21 mg Nicoderm patch. If 8 ng of TSNAs from a nicotine patch or 4 pieces of nicotine gum isn‘t likely to cause cancer, then it’s misleading to refer to those 8 ng in an e-cigarette cartridge as “carcinogens.”
The rule of thumb used when talking about potentially harmful chemicals is “The dose makes the poison.” Someone who smokes a pack of Marlboros takes in over 100,000 ng of TSNAs per day. Smoking has been linked to cancer, but there are no known cases of cancer linked to nicotine patches, gum, lozenges, prescription inhalers, or to the electronic cigarette at a daily TSNA dose of 8 ng.
As for the toxin diethylene glycol, although it can be used as antifreeze, it is also used on
tobacco to keep it moist, so it would have been more accurate for the FDA to call it “a tobacco humectant.” But that doesn’t sound as scary, does it?
The FDA did report that it detected a quantity of 1% in one of the 18 cartridges tested. No DEG was detected in the vapor from any of the cartridges, and in fact DEG has never been detected by any other organization’s testing in the liquid or the vapor.
The cartridges hold one ml of liquid, so the quantity FDA found is 0.01 ml. How toxic is this quantity? It would take 100 cartridges to accumulate 1 ml of DEG. Most consumers use one cartridge a day. Some may use as many as 3 cartridges. The fatal dose of DEG is 1 ml per kg of body weight. So for a 150 pound person to be fatally poisoned, he or she would need to ingest the contents of 6,600 cartridges—in a single day.
Dr. Michael Siegel of the Boston University School of Public Health published an article in the December 2010 issue of the Journal of Public Health Policy. He reviewed the available evidence on the safety and effectiveness of electronic cigarettes and concluded: “A preponderance of the evidence available shows that they are much safer than smoking cigarettes and comparable in the toxicity of conventional nicotine replacement products.”
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/centers-institutes/population-development/files/article.jphp.pdf
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Once again, screw the common man for the almighty dollar - and tax dollar!
