Analysis of electronic cigarette vapor

[Semiretired]

But Roly maybe the inadequate research has a purpose.

If you want something to fail what better way to do so than to use faulty research on it to begin with. If you want to show inhaling from an ecig carries violent health concerns - have the equipment setup so the equipment is utilzing vaping techniques that will produce the results you want it to produce. Heat the plastic, burn the carto / atty, overheat the battery, etc...

It is the same way with any analytical procedure. Set up your analysis so that it produces what you want it to produce or at least make sure it does not produce what you do not want it to produce... Economist, Geologist, Chemist, etc. all use these practices if that is what is necessary and what is required to satisfy the funding authority or to prove a statement that has already been made and needs backing...

 

[FreeFire]

Roly.....thank you for all your information. You truly have a gift and understanding of these matters. I enjoyed reading (and will read several more times). Thank you!

 

[rolygate]

@Semiretired
The e-cigarette field is one of the few where conspiracy theories are not seen. The money trail is so clear, the regulatory capture issues so obvious, the government corruption so necessary, that conspiracies are not needed - it's a free-fire zone for anyone who wants to bring e-cigs down, since the government agencies concerned have been bought.

Who would stand up and openly argue against a public health measure that will save at least 50% of smoking deaths? Only those financially conflicted, or maybe with some kind of personal issues.

No conspiracies needed.

The proof is in Sweden where they have the lowest smoking prevalence in the developed world by a long way, and >150 clinical trials that say their alternative tobacco product (Snus) is virtually harmless. Look at the chart of EU lung cancer rates for example, SE is right down at the bottom. With results like that their death rate from lung cancer is about a quarter of somewhere like Hungary. It parallels the number of smokers.

It's why so many doctors and professors of medicine who are public health experts have endorsed e-cigarettes. The antis have not tried to argue that the Swedish Miracle doesn't exist - that would be a tough job, with 25 years of data proving otherwise. E-cigs are a much easier target because we don't have the population-level data over decades, as they do in Sweden.

Once a pharmaceutical license is issued for an e-cigarette, things will slowly change - it will be more difficult for paid propagandists to publish lies. There is no pharma license for Snus, being an obvious tobacco product and far less vulnerable to legal assaults, but they have a mountain of data instead.

 

[Traver]

However I wouldn't be surprised if flavorings are a higher proportion than might be expected. One reason for that is because e-liquids are more heavily flavored than people think. If you DIY then you can find that you need to go to 40% flavoring in order to replicate the flavor strength of some of the commercial liquids. I doubt if there is anything much out there under 25%.

I DIY and use mostly FA flavors at 3 to 5 percent and they are already diluted with pg. Other brands usually require more flavoring up to 25% with Capella but they may be more diluted. I really don't know what the actual percentage of flavor is.

There is also a growing trend to use natural extracts. I don't have a clue as to what may be in those. Coffee beans for example are known to contain something like nineteen carcinogens. The carcinogens are in low quantities and I'm just using this as an example. I'm not sure how natural extracts are regulated or if they are regulated at all. I' not sure if the companies that sell them even know what is in them.

Even if these tests were valid things are chainging so fast that we still wouldn't know what is in the liquids vapors are buying.

 

[Martö]

MSDS sheets are already out there on PG, VG, and Nicotine. The flavors should be out there as well as everything has a MSDS for it to include paper.

take Vg for instance http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsId=9927350

 

[rolygate]

The position of MSDS sheets in consumer products is debated, Marto. They are more of use for bulk transport contractors, and only for legal issues - basically a CYA exercise in most cases. The MSDS only has relevance when a fatal dose is expressed in a low mg quantity.

For example if you look at the MSDS for PG, it clearly seems to be something that should not be consumed. On the contrary, it has over 70 years of safe use and 70 years of research that shows it is harmless apart from the occasional intolerant individual. Not only does it stop us getting Legionnaire's Disease since it is used in air conditioning systems, and is therefore present in the air of many large buildings such as hospitals, it can be ingested, inhaled and injected with no risk, which is why it is used for all those purposes in medicines. It is regarded as all but inert and certainly harmless (licensed as GRAS and Acceptably Safe everywhere). However, reading the MSDS for propane-1,2,diol you would think it could be used in chemical warfare. It's a food additive and inhaled by lung transplant patients.

The MSDS for salt, water etc are basically the same: dangerous chemicals. The basic idea is that if you are a bulk transport contractor, and a truckload of it falls on an employee, you are covered because you presented documentation for the worst possible case to the fire service personnel or whoever. Anyone else can ignore an MSDS unless the toxic dose is quoted in the 100mg range or less. The toxic dose for PG or VG is about 50 gallons, as you would need to drown in it before any harm can occur.

[edit]
Note that this only applies to pharma grade PG and VG, that is, pure or almost pure materials. The lower grades such as food grade, agricultural grade and industrial grade contain contaminants in increasing percentages. You should only inhale pharma grade materials, the others are not suitable for inhalation, and not made or sold for inhalation. Part of the reason you pay good money for eliquid is that it uses pure, pharma grade materials.

 

[Martö]

LOL it's crazy.

Boss I need the MSDS on this BIC PEN!!

I find them as a good reference though for flashpoints and ect..

 

[AriM]

So the testing is simulating a "dry hit" on a "low end" device that most of us would never use.

I think the real problem are the mall kiosk and 7-11 style e-ciggs. They contain thin mylar and tin foil seals on the cartridges. It is basically unavoidable that these substances will "burn".

So for a research firm to go out and test this small cross section of PV's is utterly absurd. These tests are obviously skewed to reach a specific conclusion.

That is the problem with lab testing, you design the test to get the result you predict. That is not anywhere near the same result that a clinical trial would reach. The only real way to do this is with clinical trials on human subjects, who are active "vapers". Process this data over a 10 year span, then have it vetted by half a dozen other research groups. Anything eles is simply academic.

 

[mwa102464]

+1000 on that AriM

 

[Jbaumer]

Gram Spectural Analysis, the "10k" drug testing system usually, but can be used for testing anything liquid.
You can set the temp to what you need for vaporaizing the sample.
If the Computer attached is up to date, there will be no 15% unkown.(makes me think I should be back on my fav UFO board)

Downside, so its usually a Hospital peice of equipment.
Upside, real tests can be done, as in taking a 1ml sample from the suppliers bottle and putting it in the machine
No flushing with reagents that will contaminate the sample, no haphazard misuse of an e-cig.


This is not a difficult procedure. What I see in the test are people trying to prove E-cigs are worse than regualr cigs
I guess some people are not happy unless they are causing others misery, shame really.

well thats my 2 cents

 

[rolygate]

The main issue with ecig tests is that any test has to be done on the vapor, since what is in the liquid is basically irrelevant. You aren't inhaling the liquid, you are inhaling vapor produced from the liquid by a specific process that will pull a certain percentage (but not all) of a given constituent out into the vapor, and may not transfer some constituents at all.

Whatever is in the solid or liquid phase before conversion to the gas phase is not relevant except as an easily-analysed indicator of what to look for in the vapor, as that is proven to be many times lower and in the case of water/PG-based vapor, much harder to isolate. As examples:

- A cigarette contains about 18mg of nicotine, but only about 5% of that is delivered to the smoke - about 0.9mg. The process is extremely inefficient.

- The FDA found a small amount of DEG contamination (about 1%) in one sample of eighteen cartos tested in 2009 (a result that could well be described as excellent as regards safety and quality). It was not detected in the vapor.
[Note that in order to be poisoned you would somehow have to drink a gallon of the liquid inside the affected cartos.]

E-liquid contains on average 18mg of nicotine per ml of liquid, but we don't know exactly how much is in the vapor - indications are that it is about 50% of that but this is simply a guess. So only about half the nicotine makes it into the vapor; and some of that may not be bioavailable as it is locked by PG. All these issues are simply guesses though until real research is carried out.

It is also not acceptable to heat the liquid in order to produce vapor to measure - you have no idea at all if this exactly replicates the nebulising process within an ecig. If someone were to do that it would be yet another example of the complete incompetence shown in the conduct of vapor tests to date.

Testing e-cigarette vapor is difficult and nobody has done it correctly and published the results, to date. All the available tests show incomplete results - a 'test' is not deserving of the name if 15% or 20% of the constituents are not identified, or if all the constituents are given and add up to almost 100% but water is not mentioned (!); and if chemicals such as phenols are present that were produced by melting plastic as a result of operating the equipment inverted; and if the photos of the test rigs show a method that could not possibly work.

It seems that labs know about as much about ecigs as the FDA do - take a look at the FDA's e-cigarette page on their website where they show a cartomizer being recharged in a battery charger. If you employ incompetents then these are the results you can expect.

 

[TTK]

<speculation>Most likely cigarette companies have done rather complete tests on ecigs. Probably extracted the vapor with something similar to those machines we used to see on BT TV advertisements many years ago. Remember the machines into which they stuck a lighted cigarette and the machine puffed on the cigarette to extract smoke? I don't know how they tested the vapor, but probably the same way they tested the smoke. I guess no one outside of BT has seen the results.</speculation>

 

[Vap_ingBilly]

Many Thanks for the info on this important topic.

I think some of the posts are being a little hard on researchers as at least some of the analyses refered to in this thread are two-a-penny commercial lab reports rather than real research. These probably only cost a few hundred dollars and so are limited. A much more rigorous analysis can be found at http://healthnz.co.nz/RuyanCartridgeReport21-Oct-08.pdf. Even this is not, strictly speaking, a formal scientific study (not published or peer-reviewed and funded by Ruyan) but is the closest I've seen to actual research on eliquid analysis.

The MSDS can seem alarming but everything is toxic depending on the concentration, even pure water (yes people have died from drinking too much water). So the important thing is to look at the LD50 numbers to put this into the correct perspective.

For example for PG the LD50 is:
Oral
Rat
20000 mg/kg
LD50

This LD50 means that 50% of rats will die if they consume orally at least 20 grams of PG for every 1 kg of body weight. So the average size rat (500g) would need to drink 10 millilitres of PG before it was toxic (at least half of the time). By comparison the rat LD50 for seawater is 3000mg/kg, so PG is about seven times safer to drink than seawater. Pure water has an rat LD50 (greater than 90ml/kg).

There is a real need for more rigorous research like the report above. Problem is this is really difficult to do even if you had unlimited research funds. Trying to work out exactly what all the constituents are in e juice is very difficult, let alone trying to work out what is converted in vapor and what interactions occur in the mouth, lungs, blood etc. A complete assessment is very difficult to achieve (have a quick look at the limitations/disclamers on any meds you have or on products like nicobate, champix, varenciline etc.). Suprisingly little is known about the health consequences of many pharmaceuticals and we generally rely on some authority to provide us a determination that it is safe (FDA etc), although they dont know any more than the available research, more of a best guess based on the limited evidence and excluding the more obvious problems.

So while there is a real need for more research, the avaible evidence referred to in this and other threads indicates that the constituents in eliquid become toxic at levels 100 to 1 million times greater than the concentrations in ejuice. As reported, these levels are actually much lower since many constituents are exhaled following inhalation. From an admitedly brief reading, the main concerns seem to be the unknown toxicty of some of the flavours used, although even these may not be a problem at common vaping temps. Still as often advised in these forums, best practice is to limit the flavours you add to ejuice.

One thing you can do while waiting for the research to catch up with you is use your body as a test tube and do your own analysis. Like me you probably smoked about a packet a day. Like me, you probably noticed almost immediately you didnt constantly crave a cigarette and smell like an ashtray. When you did try one you couldnt take more than a few puffs. Your brain had already began to disassociate the unpleasant and toxic effects of cigarette smoke from nicotine. At this point, cigarettes were history and you were a member of the Vaping Nation.

Then around two weeks later you noticed your smokers cough had disappeared. After 1 month or so people began commenting that your skin tone and texture had changed dramatically, you actually look healthy. Then you began to notice you could enhale a rapid deep lung full of air without coughing. A little later you were late for a meeting and ran up a couple of flights of stairs. After sitting down it began to dawn on you that something was missing. That's it...you werent puffing, wheezing, sweating profusely.

You dont need a doctorate to work out that vaping nicotine is therefore about 23.02 zillion times safer than smoking tobacco. You also shouldnt need a doctorate to understand that vaping isnt 100% safe, nothing is. Can it be made safer, of course it can be but we need to wait for more research. Meantime I think the ECF forums like this are the best place to keep yourself up todate with current knowledge about health issues and research.


PS, in the orignal post 'dehydrate' should be changed to hydrate. PG is very miscible in water and if you get any on the skin or eyes a splash of water will prevent any irritation occuring.

 

[SteveW]

That Ruyan study is a great read, thanks for posting the link. We need some zealous post grad students to do their doctorates on e cigs as alternatives to analogues. We may then get some hard lab research as well as useful statistics on the efficacy of vaping as a smoking cessation tool.