This is regarding the letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine regarding formaldehyde in PG, and the article provided by Matt regarding that letter to the editor.
1. The letter to the editor contains obvious errors which I presume are typos or utter failures in mathematical notation. However, these typos make it completely impossible to make any sense of the math. For example, the article says that each puff consumed 5 to 11 ml of e-liquid. The article also says that the formaldehyde figures obtained are based on a daily use of 1050 ml of e-liquid. Somebody missed some decimal points.
I'm not willing to totally dismiss the letter to the editor, but it is a joke with the errors it currently contains. Here is a link to that entire letter as published:
MMS: Error (Even though the link as translated by ECF says "error", the link works.)
2. The "defense" seems to be obsessed with a claim that people do not vape at 12 watts. That's a rather absurd defense, considering that many vapers vape at 12 watts and higher. I'm further going to guess that just because a delivery device with a given resistance is vaped at a given wattage, it does NOT mean that it releases the same amounts of ANYTHING as a DIFFERENT delivery device with the same resistance at the same wattage. I can vape a 1.8 ohm BVC coil in a Nautilus at 12 watts, but I cannot vape a 1.8 ohm Ce4 top coil at 12 watts without severe burning.
3. The letter to the editor claims 5 to 15 times higher cancer risk from vaping than from smoking. This is NOT scientific reasoning. It is based on one and only one of the many carcinogens found in cigarettes. There is some stuff in the letter to the editor about "slope" for the cancer-causing effect of formaldehyde, so it is possible that the authors know something I don't, but since I don't think it's possible to determine WHICH carcinogen caused a given cancer, I believe I'm on the right track until shown otherwise.
Suppose the worst for moment, that there actually is a 5 to 15 times higher risk of developing FORMALDEHYDE-CAUSED cancer from e-liquid vapor than from cigarettes. What about the risk from all of the other carcinogens that are found in cigarettes but are NOT found in e-cigarette vapor? Yet, the letter to the editor claims that vaping itself carries a 5 to 15 times higher cancer risk than smoking. That's simply illogical and shows poor analytic capabilities on the part of those who wrote the letter. If the authors had scientific abilities, they would have properly said that they felt that vaping carried a higher risk for formaldehyde-caused cancer only. What percentage of cancers is caused by formaldehyde rather than by another carcinogen? I could be wrong but I don't think anyone knows.
4. By failing to specify the PV, the delivery device and the resistance of the coil, the researchers who submitted the letter to the editor have failed to conduct a meaningful experiment.
