Researchers Call E-Cigarette Critics ‘Alarmists’
University College London (UCL) researchers called recent claims made against electronic cigarettes by the World Health Organization (WHO) “alarmist” and “bizarre,” reports BBC News.
The researchers said that increasing e-cigarette use among smokers could actually save lives, noting that for every one million current smokers who switch to the devices, more than 6,000 lives a year could be saved.
WHO has made claims about the risk of e-cigarettes acting as a gateway for non-smokers to start smoking nicotine cigarettes. However, the UCL team found that the number of non-smokers using e-cigarettes amounted to less than 1% of the population, according to the Smoking Toolkit study, a monthly survey of smokers in England, reports the BBC.
Professor Robert West added that even though some toxins were present in e-cigarette vapor, the concentrations were very low.
“You have to be a bit crazy to carry on smoking conventional cigarettes when there are e-cigarettes available,” he told the BBC, adding, “The vapor contains nothing like the concentrations of carcinogens and toxins as cigarette smoke. In fact, concentrations are almost all well below a twentieth of cigarettes.”
Researchers at the National Addiction Centre and the Tobacco Dependence Unit at Queen Mary University agreed, adding that some of WHO’s assumptions are “misleading” and based on “little hard data.”
“I think any responsible regulator proposing restricting regulation has to balance reducing risks with reducing potential benefits,” lead researcher Professor Peter Hajek told the BBC.
The BBC adds that WHO has yet to respond to the criticisms of its work on electronic cigarettes.