Making popcorn, smoking, and vaping, all rather different. Coming at us in different ways. Airborn dust, smoke, vapor. Mixed or in solution with different carriers. Hot, cold, warm. Steady continuous exposure, intermittent high exposures to hot vapor or smoke with breaks in between.
I don't think we can go from a handful of cases of BO in popcorn workers to saying smoking or vaping are likely to be dangerous. Neither can we go the other way and say that because smoking DK's hasn't led to large outbreaks of BO that vaping the stuff is safe. Or that because supposed cases in popcorn workers appeared within a couple of years that five years of BO-free vaping proves there's no danger. The only bit of what I see as reliable evidence is that rats or in-vitro tissue exposed to very high levels of the stuff show consequences. But there's a big gap between that and vaping in the real world.
We have very little information. I see no justification for confidently believing that vaping DK's is either safe or not safe. That's not going to matter to unprincipled people who are looking for ammunition to shut vaping down. But it should matter to us.
A lot of these threads seem to be based on "proving" by debate and analogies and reductio arguments and so forth that it is either safe or not safe. We all have to make decisions based on our best judgement, or best guess.
You said:
The only bit of what I see as reliable evidence is that rats or in-vitro tissue exposed to very high levels of the stuff show consequences.
Do you really believe that lab rats are more reliable evidence than ONE BILLION SMOKERS? And millions of vapers, who have been vaping for 7 years or more? Do you believe that lab rats and concocted short term tests of tissue samples trump the experience of ONE BILLION SMOKERS??????
Lab rats and tissue experiments are considered less than ideal proxies for the real world. Those experiments are generally done with the absence of large scale epidemiological evidence. They are considered a less than ideal proxy, a less than ideal model, of the real world. They are useful to suggest, and only suggest, what might come from a large scale, long term, epidemiological study.
But in this case, we have the real world epidemiological evidence of ONE BILLION SMOKERS, fully one seventh of the world's population, that contradicts that "less than ideal science". Not ONE SINGLE CASE of BO has ever been found in a smoker (outside of popcorn factory workers and the like).
The real science here is sociological, the science of propaganda and how propaganda can be used to convince people that plain simple evidence should be ignored. And how it is so, so effective.
But don't confuse science with propaganda. Science is the business of applying observations in order to prove or disprove theories. Here the observational evidence is as clear as it possibly could be.
If you wanted to try to determine the long term impact of inhaling some random substance (such as the other hundreds of flavors we vape), but there were no large scale epidemiological studies available, then lab rat experiments are the next best thing. But that next best thing is far removed from real world observations of human populations.
Why people such as yourself choose to ignore or belittle the REAL SCIENCE of ACTUAL OBSERVATIONS OF THE EFFECTS ON HUMANS is beyond my comprehension, but a very good study of the art of propaganda. If you truly believe that lab rat experiments trump the overwhelming conclusion based on ONE BILLION human test subjects, you need to look deep into yourself and your beliefs, and try to separate "science" from propaganda.
I'm not picking on you. Your views represent the crux of this argument, and the fallacy of the propaganda. In fact, the medical community was in total agreement that BO is a DUST BORNE hazard, until politics entered the "science". And then we were back to hunting for witches, which is where politics always takes science when science is willing to go there. We've learned nothing in the past 400 years. We are still burning witches at the stake, regardless of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Thank you for having the patients to continue saying it. I, for one, am hearing you.
