Siegel calculated that the diacetyl levels found in the DHHS funded Harvard vapor study were 750 times lower than what cigarette smoke creates.
Mike Siegel: New study finds that average diacetyl exposure from vaping is 750 times lower than from smoking
The Rest of the Story: Tobacco News Analysis and Commentary: New Study Finds that Average Diacetyl Exposure from Vaping is 750 Times Lower than from Smoking
Very interesting comments in that article. This one is fascinating, I wonder if the guy knows what he's talking about.
"The study notes that the lowest level of exposure at which popcorn lung was detected in workers working for 8 hours per day was 0.2ppm. According to the converter at
http://www.unitconversion.org/... I believe that works out to 200 mcg/Liter. that's 200,000 micrograms per cubic meter. At about one meter average working air intake per hour, it was found that workers inhaling 1,600,000 micrograms of diacetyl every day for years began developing popcorn lung.
As opposed to this concern about Vapers inhaling about 10 micrograms.
Actually, while Dr. Siegel didn't go into the specifics of it, if we reasonably dropped the weird high-level outlier of 238 micrograms supposedly measured for the kid-loving-candy-flavored "Peach Schnapps" variety (Golly but those kidz DO luv their Schnapps, now don't they?) the average exposure drops to below FIVE micrograms.
So the ordinary vaper of these weird flavored fluids would have to sit around vaping for roughly 160,000 days (i.e. FOUR HUNDRED AND THIRTY-EIGHT **YEARS**) to get just a one day equivalent exposure to the workers who need to work for years on end to get the dreaded popcorn lung. How many years? It's not clear what the minimum might be, but from the information supplied let's *guess* we're talking about popcorn workers generally working at least ten years before they're buttered up and put away.
So how many days of e-cigging would it take for e-ciggers to get that sort of nasty worker dose? 160,000 x 10yrs x 300 workdays per year =
584,000,000 days of puffing away on an ecig (about one and a half million years) before the typical e-cigger might get popcorn lung.
Feel free to check my figures: I *have* been known to accidentally drop/add a decimal point here or there as I do a lot of this stuff in my head... but realize this: even if I'm off by a full order of magnitude we'd still be looking at 160,000 years of puffing. If I was off by THREE orders of magnitude, it would STILL take the better part of 2000 years of constant puffing.
The jury is still out as to whether ecigs might be somewhat harmful or somewhat beneficial to health, but if they're truly beneficial enough to extend the average life span to over fifteen hundred years...
Well hell's bells on a trampoline, I'd take my popcorn lung at that point with a cherry on top and a big silly smile!"