Move Past Dramatic E Cigarette Claims to Save Lives

While there are many dissidents in the anti-smoking / anti- e cigarette camp who firmly believe that vaping should be banned entirely and is highly damaging new research is proving otherwise. Indeed it would appear that these reports show that vaping could actually be saving lives, something those against the smoking alternative do not want to hear or be heard.

According to experts from the University College London over six thousand lives could be saved for every tobacco smoker who chooses to move over to e cigarettes. Considering the damage tobacco smoker will have already done to their bodies having previously being a cigarette smoker these numbers are encouraging.

While WHO (the World Health Organisation) have called for e cigarettes to be banned in public places in the same way tobacco cigarettes are (in line with the Go Smoke Free legislation which has been widely adopted throughout the EU and globally) they still sit firmly on the fence with regards to classifying e smoking. Tobacco smoking on the hand has been firmly classified as being a cause of cancer, toxic and harmful to health.

The researchers in question, working out of the UCL also found that the numbers of non-smokers taking up e smoking worked out at less than 1% of the smoking population of the UK, a significantly lower number than anti-smoking campaigners predicted. The research team did conclude that while some toxins may be present in the vapour that comes from e cigarette smoking (a concern the WHO used when citing their reasoning for their call to include vaping in the public smoking ban) their finding showed that the levels of these were very low indeed.

A lead researcher commented that it would be "crazy" to choose to smoke tobacco cigarettes which are widely accepted as being harmful to health when a cleaner alternative was available. Prof West, UCL went on to state in relation to these research findings that if all 9m smokers with the UK moved over to e smoking there was the potential for 54,000 lives to be saved. As the number of premature deaths with the UK each year attributed to smoking tobacco currently sits at 60,000 per annum this is a significant claim.

In light of this research and other similar studies which go on to show that the concentration of the toxins WHO were concerned about actually sits at less that twenty times less than those found in tobacco smoke many have called the WHO's ban stance into question.

Professor Peter Hajuk, the lead researcher went on to state that anyone looking to regulate a ban such as this needed to ensure that decisions were made which balanced any risks against any potential health benefits which doesn't seem to have occurred here. The Tobacco Dependence Unit (Queen Mary Uni) and National Addiction Centre (King's College, London) also voiced concerns that some of the claims the World Health Organisation had made in order to support their current stance were misleading at best.

Clearly the issue is a cloudy one however with more and more research coming to the fore supporting e smoking as a safer and healthier alternative many have to wonder how long organisations such as WHO can hold out on giving e smoking the green light.