In the News 31st March

Tuesdays News at a glance:

An interview with a Dutch vaping advocate .. The Face of Big Vaping .. Nicotine makes you smarter. Journalists need some urgently .. Another scare story about e-cigarettes. What we should be worrying about is sugar .. A Moral and Ethical Responsibility to Educate .. They are StillBlowingSmoke .. More Truth-Free Junk From The BMA .. Alarmist survey on teenage vaping misses the point .. Expert reaction to study on e-cigarette use by teenagers .. A real peer review of Hughes et al paper on teenage use of ecigs ..

An interview with a Dutch vaping advocate

“I got involved in an EU (in Brussels) demonstration 2 or 3 years ago. I was involved in a good Dutch forum, a friend of mine Marcel was the one who really started off our group, we then developed a good website. With all that information now online the media interest began to grow, it started with a small amount of work and it grew and grew. I was single at the time and it was a good way to meet people, it all sounds like the beginning of a rock and roll band but we take this stuff a little more seriously…..”

An Excellent Double Bill from Fergus Mason:

The Face of Big Vaping

So on Saturday I got pointed to this article, which purports to tell us how “Big Vaping” is spreading cynical misinformation on behalf of the tobacco industry, presumably to hook a new generation of nicotine addicts or some other dire outcome. The article, frankly, sent my blood pressure through the roof. Hosted on Vox.com, a sort of internet rest home for people who’d like to be journalists but have the investigative abilities of a stunned whelk, it’s written by a talentless oxygen thief named Julia Belluz…..

Nicotine makes you smarter. Journalists need some urgently.

This is going to be one of those weeks; I can tell. The Guardian and Mirror have just published articles about the latest, and possibly worst, paper on the threat e-cigs pose to the nation’s children.

Are you bored of reading about yet another study on the evils of vaping? I am. It’s dull. It’s infuriating. It’s killing my brain cells through repeated violent head/desk interactions. But sadly the flow of bovine excrement from the ANTZ just never seems to stop….

Congratulations to Vapers in Power

The Crowdfunding has achieved it’s goal of £3000

Alarmist survey on teenage vaping misses the point

I think this study is being widely misunderstood or spun …It may actually may be showing something that is a good thing.  Let’s examine four things that must be considered when assessing the implications of this survey – then some expert reaction and consumer reaction:

Another scare story about e-cigarettes.

What we should be worrying about is sugar

‘E-Cigs Time Bomb’, shrieks the front page of today’s Daily Mirror. Vaping gets kids hooked on nicotine, experts fear. Experts do a lot of ‘fearing’, it strikes me, but what we don’t know – cannot know for years – is whether e-cigarettes will cause long-term addiction to nicotine. Or what proportion of those nicotine addicts will be people who wouldn’t have smoked cigarettes if a safer alternative hand’t been available. Tiny is my guess….

Expert reaction to study on e-cigarette use by teenagers

“However, while the study asks questions about frequency and amount of tobacco and alcohol use, for e-cigarettes it only asks whether a young person has ever tried or purchased an e-cigarette. This ignores a key question, which is whether young people are regularly using e-cigarettes.  Other surveys have so far found that progressing from ever trying an e-cigarette to regular use amongst non-smoking children is very rare or entirely absent, suggesting that, to date, e-cigarettes are not responsible for creating a ‘new generation’ of nicotine addicts, despite what some commentators have claimed.”

A real peer review of Hughes et al paper on teenage use of ecigs

As I alluded to in the previous post, I am working on a project to review the quality of peer review of papers in the THR space. The first step in that is to write a review of the original submission to the journal. It will then be compared to what the journal’s reviewers actually wrote. It just so happens that a paper that came out today and that is currently dominating the chattering on the topic — “Associations between e-cigarette access and smoking and drinking behaviours in teenagers”, by Karen Hughes, Mark A Bellis, Katherine A Hardcastle, Philip McHale, Andrew Bennett, Robin Ireland, and Kate Pike — happens to fit the criteria for inclusion in our study. So I went ahead and wrote my review of it so I could share it before everyone moves on to a new shiny object du jour.

They Are StillBlowingSmoke

A Moral and Ethical Responsibility to Educate

Since my baptism into the ranks of Advocacy, I have read a LOT of articles, studies and other blog posts about the safety and efficacy of vaping, as it relates to smoking cessation, tobacco harm reduction and safety. I have also attended some meetings and watched others, where a seemingly endless parade of “Healthcare Professionals” march to the podium to deliver what I can only classify as a blatant attempt to keep smokers smoking. As a fellow Healthcare Professional, and a newly minted member of the Medical Organizations supporting Vaping and Electronic cigarettes (M.O.V.E.), I am appalled to see the behavior of some of them!

More Truth-Free Junk From The BMA

From Puddlecote Inc:

There must be an organisational problem at the British Medical Association because they seem to have trouble finding spokespersons who can tell the truth on the radio.

We’ve seen the embarrassment that is Vivienne Nathanson before, a BMA mouthpiece who insisted that one cigarette smoked in a car emitted 23 times more toxins than in a pub prior to the smoking ban – despite it being complete and utter nonsense – and now we have Dr George Rae….